The Birth of the Fiber Optic Restoration Kit

In today’s connected world we are very attached to our devices, whether we are at home or out and about. 

What happens when your internet service goes down?  We rely on our fiber optic networks more than ever now.  Working from home, remote learning, telemedicine and simple, every day communications are critical now more than ever before.  And some companies and individuals have Service Level Agreements (SLA’s), the internet service provider is basically guaranteeing the level of service they will supply and if for some reason they do not live up to that agreement, they agree to pay a “fine” to the customer. 

I worked very closely with a major cable TV service provider.  We were in a meeting and it was getting down to the end when I asked them if there was anything that they didn’t have that would make their job easier.  One of the guys spoke up and said there was nothing more stressful than restoring service during an outage.  Gathering the supplies to get the service back up is always a challenge.  Spare cable is in one location.  Splice closures are in another location.  Fusion splicers and tools may or may not be in the truck sent to evaluate the outage.  By the time you get all the necessary supplies to the site, hours have passed, and everyone’s stress level is through the roof.  You might be tempted to say, “They should keep a reel of cable and splice enclosures in every service truck.”  In reality this just isn’t feasible.  Reels of cable are bulky, heavy and would also require some sort of stand to mount the reel on in order to pay off the cable from the reel, which would take up even more room in the truck, and these are not the only supplies that need to be transported in a service truck.  Technicians are dispatched to many different kinds of service calls – everything from a customer’s equipment not working to a downed fiber cable.  They have to carry a wide variety of supplies in their trucks to be able to take care of all the different kinds of problems they may encounter.  There simply isn’t room for large spools of cable and the bulky splice closures. 

So what they wanted was what they called a restoration kit, and they went on to explain what they were hoping it would be able to do.  They were looking for a compact “package” that would have everything they needed except the fusion splicer.  And ideally they wanted the cable already prepped into the splice closures, in order to save time on the site so they could restore service faster.  I told them to give me some time to think about it and toss some ideas around with our engineers.  They said they had asked other companies for this same thing and none of them came up with a solution.  That just made me determined to find a way to make it happen. 

I brought my notes back to the office and set up a meeting with the engineers.  They thought about it for a couple of weeks.  Ultimately they came back and told me that it couldn’t be done.  Not ready to accept defeat I kept thinking about it.  I talked about it with some people who think outside the box.  I knew it was a challenge but I knew there had to be a solution. 

In a conversation with a co-worker we thought about the re-deployable communication cables that the military uses for communications, and that broadcasters use to record sporting events and concerts.  These kind of fiber assemblies are used over and over.  They are stored on reels that can be unwound and rewound over and over.  I did some research and found a reel that could hold enough fiber optic cable to be useful.  This reel also was mounted on castor wheels so it would be easy for one person to move into position for deployment.  The customer had requested to have a minimum of 1,000 feet of a 48 fiber cable.  The outside diameter of the cable dictates how much cable can fit on the storage reel.  Then I came up with a way to mount the splice closures on the cable reel.  This didn’t turn out to be as challenging as originally thought.  Standard closure mounting brackets attached to the top of the cable reel did the trick very nicely.  The last challenge was to find a 48 fiber cable with a jacket that would not have too much “memory”.  When you are talking about cable jacketing, memory refers to the cable’s tendency to retain the general shape it had last.   In this situation, the concern was that the cable would hold on to the looping of being stored on a circular drum.  What was needed was that when it was unspooled it would lay flat on the ground instead of looping.  The cable would also have to be outdoor rated so that it could stand up to moisture and temperature extremes.  After a great deal of research and many cable samples later, this last piece of the puzzle was found. 

The cable was loaded onto the reel and one side was prepped into one of the splice closures.  The closure was mounted on top of the reel along with the empty closure.  The cable couldn’t be prepped into both closures because the closure would get hung up when the cable is being pulled off the reel, so one end was left free.

We did some testing to make sure that everything worked well and that there weren’t any issues.  The cable was deployed and rewound multiple times.  The closures were removed from the cable reel and remounted.  Everything was working just as we hoped it would.  It was time to see what the customer thought about my invention, so I made an appointment to take it out to show it to them.

When we arrived at the customer’s facility we unloaded the restoration kit and wheeled it inside.  They took us out to their warehouse area and had some of their technicians on hand to check the kit out.  They pulled the cable off the reel and re-spooled it several times.  They took the closures off the top of the cable reel and remounted them.  Everything worked very well.  The meeting was a success!  They were impressed with the solution and committed to buying the restoration kit for all of the areas they serviced.