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How To Buy Bulk Fiber Optic Cable

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Optical Fiber Cable Construction

The structure of bulk fiber optic cables have many important characteristics. The fiber optic cable construction needs to provide protection from the external environment in the installation and the fiber optic cable work life time.

They must provide mechanical protection for all the fibers inside the cable, in the meantime, the fiber optic cable has to be pretty easy to handle. Most the time, non-metallic strength members are needed to fully take advantage of fiber’s dielectric property.

Bulk fiber optic cable will experience tensile stress, abrasion, cutting, flexing, bending, crushing during the installation and its operation life. These mechanical stresses introduce macrobending, microbending, light signal loss attenuation.

Due to incomplete production, small surface defects often exist in the optical fibers. So in the real world, fibers tend to break at the cracks that begin from these surface defects under heavy tensile tension.

Bulk Fiber Optic Cable Structural Elements

Optical cables can be divided into several main types. However, the basic elements in a fiber cables are a central strength member, be it metallic or non-metallic, strength members, water barrier (dry water swelling tapes or water blocking gel), a fiber housing (loose tube), and cable sheaths. Armored fiber cables also have aluminum or steel armors for rodent protection for direct burial.

A central strength member sitting in the center of the cable, fiber glass do most of the time. The center provides rigid cable strength members, prevent bulk fiber cable from bending too fast. It also provides the core of the cable.

In addition to the power of the central member, as another layer of fiber strength member is also used. They are made from aramid yarn (most of the time), Nylon yard, fiber glass epoxy rod or even steel. Aramid yarn is also called Kevlar, it has a high breaking strain and about fiber times stronger than steel. They offer low weight and all-dielectric construction.

Types of Bulk Fiber Optic Cable

Bulk fiber optic cables can be categorized into several major types. That includes outdoor cable, fiber optic breakout cable, Ribbon Fiber cable, Figure 8 Aerial cable, Loose tube cable and more.

To learn more about the type of fiber cable available on the market, or want to purchase our cable, please visit our website. As one of the best OEM fiber optic cable manufacturers, FiberStore provides a wide range of quality optical fiber cables with detailed specifications displayed for your convenient selecting. Per meter price of each fiber cable is flexible depending on the quantities of your order, making your cost of large order unexpected lower. Customers can also have the flexibility to custom the cable plant to best fit their needs. Only fiber cable that meets or exceeds industry standards is used to ensure quality products with best-in-class performance.

Breakout Fiber Optic Cable

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Breakout fiber cable also called fanout cable, is an optical fiber cable containing several jacketed simplex optical fibers packaged together inside an outer jacket. They can be easily divided into individual fiber lines as each fiber is individually reinforced. This differs from distribution style cable, in which tight-buffered fibers are bundled together, with only the outer jacket of the cable protecting them. The design of breakout-style cable adds strength for ruggedized drops, however the cable is larger and more expensive than distribution-style cable. Breakout cable is suitable for short riser and plenum applications and also for use in conduits, where a very simple cable run is planned to avoid the use of any splice box or spliced fiber pigtails.

Because each fiber is individually reinforced, the breakout cable can be easily divided into individual fiber lines. Each simplex cable within the outer jacket may be broken out and then continue as a patch cable, for example in a fiber to the desk application in an office building. This enables connector termination without requiring special junctions, and can reduce or eliminate the need for fiberoptic patch panels or an optical distribution frame. Breakout cable requires terminations to be done with simple connectors, which may be preferred for some situations. A more common solution today is the use of a fanout kit that adds a jacket to the very fine strands of other cable types.

Breakout cables normally contain a ripcord, two non-conductive dielectric strengthening members (normally a glass rod epoxy), an aramid yarn, and 3 mm buffer tubing with an additional layer of Kevlar surrounding each fiber. The ripcord is a parallel cord of strong yarn that is situated under the jacket(s) of the cable for jacket removal.

A breakout fiber optic cable offers a rugged cable design for shorter network designs. This may include LANs, data communications, video systems, and process control environments.

A tight buffer design is used along with individual strength members for each fiber. This permits direct fiber optic cable termination without using breakout kits or splice panels. Due to the increased strength of Kevlar members, breakout fiber optic cables are heavier and larger than the telecom types with equal fiber counts.

The term breakout defines the key purpose of fiber optic breakout cable. That is, one can “break out” several fibers at any location, routing other fibers elsewhere. For this reason breakout cables are, or should be, coded for ease of identification.

Because fiber optic breakout cable is found in many building environments where codes may require plenum cables, most breakout cables meet the NEC’s requirements. The cable is available in a variety of designs that will accommodate the topology requirements found in rugged environments. Fiber counts from simplex to 256 are available.

If you would like to purchase our breakout fiber optic cable or want to learn about outdoor fiber optic cable or fibre optic cable specification, please visit our website.