Bam Infratechniek Telecom BV installs each year hundreds of kilometers cable for fibre-, coax- and copper networks. Their services include the entire supply chain of design, engineering, realization, project management, service and maintenance. Rob van Halderen is projectmanager for Fibre-to-the-Home projects in and around Amsterdam.
Rob: “I’ve known Hans Tovar of Mulder-Hardenberg as a reliable person and supplier for many years. Shipments of optical distribution frames and fiber optic drawers are always as planned. That’s why we were both glad to build another POP in IJburg for a new FttH-project of approx. 11,000 homes.
The Challenge
To achieve a cost reduction the customer decided to follow an unconventional path: by using fiber cabling with a higher capacity than usual in Fiber-to-the-Home projects. The high-capacity cable reduced the amount of excavation activities for the civil engineering team, which in term saved a lot of time and money. Because of the fact that fiber optic drawers have been designed for the commonly used 96-way fiber cables some adjustments had to be made to the technical design of the product.
Rob: “I discussed the cabling-challenge with Hans Tovar of Mulder-Hardenberg. Because of the design we had to distribute 192-way fiber cables instead of the standard 96-way fiber cables. In the market there are break-out boxes available to do this, which you can install on the side of an ODF (Optical Distribution Frame). This is a workable solution, however not a very attractive one”
One of the other major challenges was the lead time; the project had to be thought out, designed and executed at breakneck speed. The only thing the customer had was an empty space of a former shop with apartments above.
The Solution
To distribute the increased capacity of fiber optic cabling it was decided to attach an Y-coupling on the back of the fiber optic drawers . This mechanical adjustment was the perfect solution to divide the 192 fibers in two fiber drawers.
As a part of this solution Mulder-Hardenberg also supplied the patch cables and the home-connection kits. To avoid unnecessary stock piling all materials were supplied shortly before installation (Just-In-Time-Delivery).
Rob: “This solution was really a great idea; attractive, effective and it didn’t require any additional space. The development of this idea followed soon, and after receiving the approval of our customer I could place the order. As expected the goods arrived perfectly in time.”
The Implementation
Rob: “During the installation Hans visited the site on a regular basis. Together with our welders he even invented an installation method to fix the tubes in one place, so that they wouldn’t get stuck when opening the fiber drawers.”
The result
The result is a perfect division between pigtails and splice cassettes which don’t damage each other, a neatly spliced cable that saves lots of space and a POP to be proud of!
Rob: “In about half a year the POP has been built and the homes were connected. This POP was visited by many customers and colleagues as an example of how a well-built POP looks like. Eventually it is a piece of work that we can all be proud of.”
