importance of fiber cleaning

[baldur.norddahl at gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl)]

It is a good article. It is missing a few points:

If you are going to do the full efford of cleaning and then microscope 
each connector, you would also want to finish off by doing a OTDR scan 
of the link. This is your documentation for a clean link.

Always use optics that can monitor the signal level. The reality is that 
best practice, as described in the article, will not always be followed. 
In most case you will be good anyway as long your optics report back a 
signal strength with a good margin. Have your automated monitoring 
system watch over those signal levels.

Slightly dirty connectors will often give a sufficient link quality 
anyway if you have plenty of power budget to spare. We use many 1G 
single mode BIDI optics which cost about 10 USD each for 20 km modules 
and most of the links are only 1-5 km. The customer end of those links 
are probably all half dirty, but nobody cares as long we get a strong 
signal back with power budget to spare.

Regards,

Baldur

On 09/21/2016 07:56 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>
> https://www.sunet.se/blogg/long-read-cleanliness-is-a-virtue/
>
> This is an excellent article regarding fiber cleaning and its 
> importance. Please do share with other people in our business. I'm 
> sure lack of proper fiber cleaning causes a lot of unneccessary 
> outages and operational problems worldwide, partly because people 
> aren't aware of its importance.
>