DIN EN 61300-3-35:2010-08

This part of the 61300 standard series which deals with the measurement and test engineering for glass fibre joining technology, shows how close standardization works on current and market relevant problems. This part is a practice-oriented standard for the assessment of polished endfaces of cylindrical ferrules of glass fibre connectors. These ferrule endfaces are the most important part of fibre-optical connections and thus represent a failure-relevant part in optical fibre cabling. This cable is present in many areas of today's communication technology. Mobile/cellular phone calls are transferred via fibre optic routes from the transmitter and receiver stations to landlines; the connections of the network nodes of the telecommunication network and also DSL and data highways would be impossible without these fast transmission lines. In order to satisfy the demand for bandwidths of companies and private users, entire computer centres are being equipped with more and more parallel multimode routes. The currently introduced fibre-to-the-home projects, by which these glass fibre networks are extended to the end user, increase the range of bandwidth necessary in the computer centre. This makes it even more important to ensure quality of the passive optical network components present in this environment. The ever-decreasing power budgets of modern transmission methods such as the 10 Gigabit Ethernet or, also, the forthcoming 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, can be only reached with perfectly polished and controlled endfaces. Anyone who plans, installs and, above all, runs fibre optic routes must be aware of this fact. Consequently every fibre optic connector shall be cleaned and controlled before every mating process. Scratches and other defects are classified with detailed images. Therewith the quality definition between manufacturer and customer is simplified. The three described methods for the observation and measurement of connector endfaces allow for quality tests with an effort which has been adjusted to manufacturer and customer requirements. The annex contains examples for defects, but also methods for the creation of test artefacts necessary for calibration. The Committee responsible for this standard and the available Technical Report E DIN IEC 62627, dealing with practice-oriented optical fibre end face cleaning methods is Subcommittee 412.7 "LWL-Verbindungstechnik und passive optische Komponenten" ("Fibre optic interconnecting devices and passive optical components") of the DKE (German Commission for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies) at DIN and VDE. DIN EN 61280-4-1 "Installed cable plant - Part 4-1: Multimode attenuation measurement" for which Subcommittee 412.2 is also responsible, has already been published. This standard addresses anyone involved in the designing and installing of fibre optic routes. The standard describes in detail the measurement and test procedures of installed fibre optic routes with insertion loss testing devices and optical time domain reflectometers (OTDR) and therefore shall be read by designers and installers who seriously deal with this technique. Other standards on these current topics are currently under development.