My colleague and I may be running a new dark fiber network in the Northeast.
We need an outsourced NOC to monitor for fiber cuts and serve as a contact point for customers.
Am I wrong in believing that there should be a way of lighting a single pair in the cable and then monitoring it for signal disruption? It is not a perfect solution, but arguably better than learning that the cable has been damaged from an irate customer.
It sounds like you don’t have an experienced fiber optic network engineer on the project yet. There is much more to facilities monitoring then just checking for disruption. I recommend that you either retain a consulting engineer or employ one during development. I’m sure operators here are happy to share their ideas, but you will need some expertise in fiber infrastructure to make intelligent decisions about optics, wavelengths, in-band versus out-of-band administration, and a slew of other topics.
Doing this without experienced engineering help is like starting an airline without pilots
You can even monitor the actual customer fiber, since it uses wavelength 1650nm which does not interfere with Grey / CWDM / DWDM signals.
Up to 64 fibers per unit, with a maximum distance of 160km and it can even monitor PON networks behind the splitters.
The best part for troubleshooting is that it integrates with existing GIS systems which show you the location of the suspected cut on a map.
My colleague and I may be running a new dark fiber network in the Northeast.
We need an outsourced NOC to monitor for fiber cuts and serve as a contact point for customers.
Am I wrong in believing that there should be a way of lighting a single pair in the cable and then monitoring it for signal disruption? It is not a perfect solution, but arguably better than learning that the cable has been damaged from an irate customer.
Well that’s easy - any halfway decent networking gear will detect when a link goes down, and reporting that to a monitoring system.� The hard part is locating the cable break, so you can fix it - not detecting it in the first place.
And… parenthetically, if a single link failure impacts customers, you’re network is woefully badly designed.
Best to take any replies off the message board.
Probably best not to - a major point of this kind of list is to learn from each other.
Speaking of which, seeing this kind of question, from a VP at a company in the submarine cable business, would sure make me leery of leasing fiber from them, if there’s an alternative. Now, one would not necessarily expect a VP of Business Development to know all the details of network management - but seems to me that he’s basically advertising that he’s learned about cable breaks from irate customers, rather than being forewarned by his operations team that “you’re about to get a bunch of irate calls.”
Heck, back in the old days (I was at BBN designing network management for the original Defense Data Network) - we knew how to instrument our networks, and design for redundancy & diverse routing. Boy did we have egg on our face when a backhoe took out all the connectivity to the Northeast. We detected the outage just fine - but we (and lots of other folks) were all caught short to discover that AT&T Long Lines routed all of our “redundant” circuits through the SAME fiber bundle. I expect there are others here who remember that debacle.
I saw someone mentioned the ADVA ALM unit and I would agree that it is a great system to use. Just as another option you could check out the NTest Fiberwatch product as well:
Thank you for the most useful comment on the thread so far!
If I'm buying dark fiber, I'm expecting it to be a bunch of spliced glass from end to end. Maybe (maybe!) a connector or two for patching somewhere. However, something like this would be useful to sell "managed" dark fiber. You still get the strand, but I add these boxes (or something like them) to detect and locate failures non-intrusively.
I would calm down, Miles. Dark fiber networks are built and usually maintained by the same construction company that installed them. And a dark fiber network does not even need a single full time optical engineer. If the cable is damaged, then the guys who installed it will repair it. All the expertise is there.
And no, I am not an executive at a undersea cable system. i was one of Hibernia Atlantic’s top salesmen during the early years from 2004-2011 after which I retired.
Just to clarify, this is a dark fiber network already built and will be repaired by the construction company that built it. I just a system to inform them as soon as the fibers are damaged.
It is definitely not a plane and does not need a pilot.
I for one, do _NOT_ in any shape or form, want my DF provider to put any equipment (monitoring, or otherwise) on strands I lease, period. I just want
tubes in the ground, end of story. This is certainly not an airplane and does not need a pilot. It's passive tubes sitting on right of way and customer
is licensed to pass light thru that passive tube. Everything else is extra, and I want no active service whatsoever (besides for power capacity at
regen plant colo).
If there is a disturbance event that creates LOS alarm on customer equipment, they will call in and open a ticket to begin troubleshooting.
Name me one dark fiber provider in northeast that (unless you buy their managed dark fiber solution) will monitor your fiber strands and the customer
light for you. I can tell you, major fiber providers in northeast are all the same: the customer is the monitoring system. If fiber is down, customers
call in. In fact, I can't recount how many times I've had dealing with a large fiber provider here (unnamed to protect the guilty) who also requests
and asks customers to shoot OTDR for them.
Generally speaking, dark fiber providers who also compete with their customers (e.g. fiber provider that sells lit services) have tendency to react
faster to certain fiber cuts on certain routes, if their backbone links are sitting in them. But for specialty dark fiber providers who only sell dark,
it's not a bad idea to light one of the strands for internal continuity checks; but at worst case scenario, when a customer calls in to report an LOS
alarm and suspects fiber disturbance, that's usually enough information to start sending your crews out and begin taking traces.
There is a middle ground between “not managing customer light” and “not managing anything” though. The Adva ALM solution that a few folks that have mentioned, along with others like Lucent SmartLGX, effectively bridge this gap by helping trace the precise location of cuts and even smaller scale incidents like microbends to expedite diagnosis and repair to the extent possible. It’s not a panacea and definitely not a substitute for managing the hardware at the endpoints, but it does improve operational responsiveness in a measurable way. And yes, there are dark fiber providers in the Northeast that leverage this technology, at least on some portion of their fiber plants.
Hrm, I got the impression from the OP that they're constructing a new network and contemplating lighting a single pair for telemetry and whole cable breaks.
I did not get the impression that they were getting strands from someone else and lighting it for sale to customers.
Funny thing then, given that you signed your original query as:
And following the link to United Cable Company’s web site reveals:
“Your source for the world’s most distinctive submarine cable assets.” And the about page says “Its mission, as a leading telecom consulting company, is to represent the world’s most distinctive submarine and terrestrial cable assets.”
Your original query asked:
In a followup message you say:
So… color me confused about who you are, who you represent, what you’re trying to accomplish, what you’re asking, and, perhaps, why you don’t already know the answer to your question, or have someone internal to your organization who already knows.
Agreed that there is a middle ground. Devices like these are something that customers can individually deploy on their lit fibers (then again, many optical
vendors now include automatic fault location (e.g. OTDR function) into their line interface cards with OSC add/drop filters (e.g. Ciena ESAM, etc).)
And ofcourse, I think it's great for carriers to deploy these on their own internal circuits for telemetry purposes and improve fault location response.
But as far as dark fiber pair that's being leased out to an end-user customer or another entity, I for one, do not want any carrier equipment whatsoever
on any fiber spans we obtain from another party (be it fiber swap with a carrier, or leased segment otherwise), full stop. Everything else besides glass
is more attenuation to me, and with data center MMRs along the eway, there are already enough insertion losses as is.
Dark fiber networks are built and usually maintained by the same construction company that installed them. And a dark fiber network does not even need a single full time optical engineer. If the cable is damaged, then the guys who installed it will repair it. All the expertise is there.