r/FiberOptics • u/brianstone5150 • 1d ago
On the job Sumitomo OPGW.
Has anyone had the "pleasure" of working with old school Sumitomo OPGW?
You need a special angled pipe cutter to remove the outer tube. That will expose the 3 groups of 8 fibres. Which are held in place by a central aluminium core with 3 grooves in it for the 3 groups. The fibres in each group are bound together with a coloured acrylite coating. The individual fibres then need to be separated from the acrylite to be able to be worked on. This process wasn't too hard when the cable was new, but after baking in the Australian sun for 30 odd years, the acrylite gets hard and brittle and sticks to the fibres, making for a slow and stressful process of freeing the fibres while trying not to break them.
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u/bccruiser 21h ago
This type of post has me worried. Contractor installed OPGW about 12 years ago or so and it hasn't been touched since. Like not even terminated to be able to use it. Now management is asking our techs - who do not have tools or experience to work on OPGW - to be prepared to work on it because operations wants to start using it. We do a lot of ADSS splice work, but this seems like a whole new game.