Testing and Troubleshooting

Many times a fibre system will start to fail or the network will experience difficulties.  To assist our clients, we are able to come on site and run a full diagnostic report on the fibre cabling.  Using Light source and power meter testers or our OTDR we can pin point any problem in the cabling to the nearest meter.  In other cases, giving the fibre a clean bill of health helps narrow down the source of the problem to the copper cabling or the active components like switches etc.

Why use an OTDR?
OTDR stands for Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. An OTDR is a finely calibrated instrument which offers the most comprehensive method presently available for testing the compliance of optic fibres in the LAN environment. It might have a complicated name, but basically it's like radar for optic fibres.

Case study
Recently one of our TV transmission clients experienced a drop out of an entire cable linking their ‘dish’ on the roof of a 68 floor CBD building to the main communications room.  After a few hours fruitless searching for the location of the break they were none the wiser (the cut had been cleverly hidden by the culprit).  With the use of the OTDR we were able to pinpoint the break to the exact metre almost immediately and commence restoration of services.

M200 Quad Band OTDR
Used to test both multimode and singlemode fibres