Monday, March 18, 2019

New Fiber Plant - MPO up the riser?

It's going to be a really good year for me.

New Campus LAN!

But It's time for our 62.5m OM1 MMF to be retired.

I have four buildings with a total of 26 floors, with each floor being serviced by one or more Cat6509Es.

We will probably replace the 6509s with Cat9400s but that's a topic for a different thread.

This thread is about fiber.

I've got a bunch of Superior ST fiber panels today. Some are wall-mounted, some are rack-mounted.

I want to standardize on Panduit fiber panels or boxes.

Two "cassettes" per floor. One with SMF and one with OM4.

The new LAN will leverage 2 x 10GbE or 2 x 25GbE uplinks per floor, probably over OM4.

The MPO modular connector gives us 12 fibers per connector, or 6 x LC connectors per MPO.

3 of my 4 buildings have properly stacked network closets with good access up & down the riser.
1 of my buildings (the oldest) is a train wreck disaster, and the fiber will need to be fished all over hell and creation to get it where it needs to go.

MPO is primarily a data center technology, which is where I learned about it.
I'm a big fan of consistent solutions & techniques.

But I'm not 100% sure MPO is the right tool or technology for permanent riser fiber cable plant installation.

I'll obviously have this same conversation with our installer (A Panduit certified & Approved installer), but I thought I'd ask for additional opinions on the subject.

Is this a good use-case for MPO, or should I stick with traditionally installed & hand-terminated fiber?



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