NQMSfiber - remote fiber test system

Referencing a fiber from day 1 is crucial to be able to automatically detect and pinpoint issues.

NQMSfiber uses this baseline to compare results and automatically find faults for you.

Without a baseline

• Is this fiber good or bad?
• Is it degraded from last time it was tested?
• Length seems as per documentation so where’s the problem?

With a baseline

• NQMSfiber automatically identifies a change (degradation) on the fiber being monitored

NQMSfiber provides true preventive maintenance through its unique capability to report slight changes in loss profiles. NQMSfiber detects and pinpoints losses in the 0.1 dB order.

Something seemingly insignificant (i.e., less than 1 dB degradation) on an OTDR trace can have significant impacts and lead to an outage–NQMSfiber helps you stay on top of your network's health and avoid issues early on.

Time to understand (TTU) issues can vary a lot depending on their nature. NQMSfiber takes that down to a few minutes.

A flood of alarms on a particular link at a given moment usually means that a cable was damaged. Despite the obvious, it can still take hours before the damaged section can be located and repaired. NQMSfiber not only automates fault localization but helps to identify progressive or intermittent issues gradually impacting more and more fibers on a specific cable route, in which case it is less obvious to identify the problem's root cause or locate it.

Typical situations with lengthy TTU:

• Rodents attacking a few fiber strands and cable areas
• Fires consuming a cable gradually
• Cable moved and bent during construction works
• Degrading splices due to humidity or water in enclosures
• Icing and de-icing due to temperature variations
• Exposure to extreme heat
• Bends created during intervention in a fiber management tray or splice enclosure
• Disconnecting the wrong port when servicing an area

The fact that NQMSfiber can integrate the external fiber inventory with GIS-related information (in most cases), allows OTDR data and the physical path to be viewed top-down on the same distance scale. This allows for rapid fixes and greatly simplifies inventory management.

Connecting and integrating physical network inventory and GIS data is critical as any measurement taken with an OTDR can be afterwards traced to the fiber documentation from the ODF port where the measurement was taken to the point of failure. NQMSfiber can automate the triggering of this tracing function by calling an external GIS using an http type call such that a GPS point and related information can be obtained in response.

NQMSfiber provides a standard SOAP/XML API in order to integrate and leverage existing cable and fiber management tools and GIS platforms without the need to duplicate and manually import or migrate these data to the monitoring platform. The GIS server must have key functions available in order to integrate, among which a daily or on-demand update of the data set so that any changes done in the field during provisioning, re-routing or maintenance activities are becoming visible to the monitoring platform.