Using the mid cable splice enclosure in Communications Utility Network Foundation

[JoelDonnelly]

I am working to model a somewhat messy, publicly owned fiber network in a city. I am wondering when it is better to use a 'mid cable splice enclosure' versus  a 'splice enclosure'. I am realizing it can be labor intensive to use a regular splice enclosure when it is not really a cable terminus, since I must connect every strand. 

1) Say I have a 108-strand fiber cable. 60 strands are spliced to another cable, while 48 pass through? Which is more appropriate?
Or say I have a 108-strand fiber cable. 96 strands are spliced to another cable, while 12 pass through?

If the majority of strands are being spliced I wonder if it would be cleaner so to speak to use a 'splice enclosure' and go ahead and connect all strands. In this case I might only use a Communications_Junction_Object:Splice when there is a real splice, otherwise I would simply connect the Connectors directly. However, this might make for an ugly splice diagram...

2) For the Junction - Edge Midspan connectivity association, what is the best way to calculate the '% along' distance field? Use a scratch feature class to calculate manually?

[Anonymous User · Accepted solution]

Hi Joel,

Nice to meet you.

In fact, "Mid Cable Splice Enclosures" are widely used in a lot of telecom network deployment projects. We have modeled one in our sample data for reference. Please check the bookmark for "Mid Cable Splice Distribution to Access" shown below:

You could investigate the cable itself, which is in fact a continuous cable without a device splitting it into two. The Mid Cable Splice Enclosure is snapped directly on the cable, where all the splicing activities are happening on the strand, chassis, and port level (non-spatial object).

So to your first question, in a 108-strand fiber cable, where you make a mid-span cut to take out 60 strands; the rest of the segment will have 60 abandon strands (need to be created and contained in the cable), so the total number of strands now is 168 = 48 Active Pass through + 60 Active to be spliced + 60 Abandoned.

Please see below for the concept. And you also have to create internal connections with new connectors added to the edge within the device to facilitate the network connectivities. Please check this link for visualization (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d307f8c5fc644185a5fdf82fb9f849eb/page/page_0/?views=view_2).

To your second question about calculating the "% along distance field", we currently don't have any Out-of-the-box solutions to provide the distance from the device to the mid-span cutting point. So doing it manually would be the only sufficient alternative for now.

We will keep this in mind and see if we could implement some enhancements in the future regarding this ask.

I hope this is helpful, and let us know if there were other questions and comments.

Junjie

[JoelDonnelly]

Thank you so much, Junjie. Your explanation and visuals are very helpful. And thanks for the link to the Data Model Explorer - I hadn't seen that page yet.

[RajaIjazHaider]

Mid Span Cable Splice is well handled in FUMS (https://enterprise.sitdigital.com/storymap/) with a fiber connection category called PassThrough