Fiber Monitoring & Diagnostics
Today’s network environment and the need for secure and smooth transport call for cost-effective, accurate, non-intrusive network visibility to monitor fiber quality, transmission signals and detect faults.
As the scale and capacity of transported data grows, so has the need to monitor the DWDM fiber link to maintain its health and continuous traffic flow, including fault isolation, generating alerts, and maintining the history of the network.
PacketLight’s fiber monitoring system (PL-1000D) provides consistent, constant and non-intrusive fiber monitoring and diagnostics - essential in ensuring high quality and uninterrupted transmission, and contributing to SLAs. The device monitors signal quality and network faults, providing carriers, dark fiber providers and enterprises a strategic asset for real-time network diagnostics. Consequently, maintenance costs are reduced and network reliability is higher as the device detects issues prior to service degradation.
Applications
Fiber monitoring and diagnostics are recommended for the following applicaitons:
- Monitoring lit DWDM fiber using a combination of OTDR and OSA
- Monitoring dark fiber for the health of the infrastructure
The Technology
The PL-1000D uses an optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) and an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) to perform non-intrusive monitoring and detect changes in the fiber such as breaks, tapping, and characteristics of the active channels in the WDM network. The OTDR supports GIS (Geographic Information System) using Rest API, enabling precise geographic location of disruption. This capability enhances operational efficiency, optimizes resource allocation, and further supports meeting high SLA.
The device monitors the entire DWDM C-band spectrum and provides the optical spectrum, OSNR, and OTDR measurements of the fiber. The PL-1000D monitors up to eight fiber strands consecutively and operates standalone over dark fiber, lighted fiber, or a third party network without impacting network traffic.
PacketLight’s embedded high-level performance monitoring (PM) provides full visibility on the fiber infrastructure and health of the transported data. This reduces the costs and time associated with deploying technicians to the field with dedicated test equipment.
