Nine
years ago Corning Cable Systems decided to create a tool that
would help their proposed and future customers manage large
fiber optic networks. Upon an outage caused by a break in
the fiber, the only method available to network operators
was to dispatch maintenance vehicles and repair crews searching
the network path looking for outward evidence of physical
damage to the cable to determine where the break was and to
repair it. Other companies suggested the use of a reflectometer
to determine the location of the break (send a ping down the
line and get distance to the break). Unfortunately the ping
is calculated in a linear fashion and cables are run on poles,
up risers and shafts, under ground, and around corners with
slack and loops at various points in the cable path. In other
words - NOT LINEAR. What operators found was that a reflectometer
would calculate the break distance to within plus or minus
30% of the actual location. This typically meant multiple
truck rolls to find and repair the break and of course, dispatching
vehicles and repair crews is very time consuming and is the
most expensive thing an operator maintenance organization
can do.
This was a real problem and was a limiting
factor on the design, size and density of traffic on a network.
Corning wanted to design a system that would
allow an operator to input the actual topography of their
network, the hardware that drives it, and have the system
determine within a plus or minus five foot radius, by GPS
coordinates, the true fault location. Thus, the OptiCon software
was created.
Today, original creators and managers of
that system have moved over from Corning to OptiCon Systems
Inc. (otcbb:OSYS) and brought the software up through intense
development releases making it more robust and precise than
ever before.
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