Fiber to 50-pair conversion

You asked for it.

Very carefully, split the fibre into 50 slivers. ;-)

Actually, the answer depends on what you want to carry. Voice? Data? Network? Etc.?

Possibly. That fiber pair is almost certainly good for 10 Mbit/s (most likely more), and 50 voice lines need 3.2 kbit/s, but that's uncompressed and 100%usage.

Hey guys, a couple of things here. Voice channels are only 56 or 64K when they are digitized. But for the issue about replacing the 50-pair tie cable. You would need four strands of fiber and four channel banks having the appropriate interfaces.

All-in-all it would be cheaper and easier to replace the 50-pair with a new one that is at least Cat3.

Rodgers Platt

????

A standard voice channel is 64 Kb/s Perhaps you meant 3.2 Mb/s?

50 voice lines need 50 times the 64 kbit/s which makes 3.2 Mbit/s.

Correct. That post "escaped" early. Note there was no --sig.

I also intended to add that fiber->copper is normally Ma's stuff. RTs are full of this sorts of gear. OP should talk to his PBX vendor to see if they have fiber units (likely).

-- Robert

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Used to be. Nowadays it seems everything has gone from circuit switched to packet switched. But I don't know if that means that inexpensive used circuit switched gear is available. It may be more economical to replace the cable.

James. I had a heck of a hard time splitting a single fiber strand into 50 slivers but by the end of the 48th hour I was successful. Now it works great. NOT.

I just want to carry voice. What I need to know is if there is an interface out there that will convert fiber into cat3 copper. I also have more than for strands available on my fiber.

Thanks.

James. I had a heck of a hard time splitting a single fiber strand into 50 slivers but by the end of the 48th hour I was successful. Now it works great. NOT.

I just want to carry voice. What I need to know is if there is an interface out there that will convert fiber into cat3 copper. I also have more than four strands available on my fiber.

Thanks

Per your original message you need more than this.

50 pairs of copper = 50 possible voice signals. Bi-directional

each strand of fiber = 1 signal in one direction.

So you're looking for a 50 channel voice (POTS I'm guessing) to fiber converter/multiplexer/demultiplexer. Not a trivial thing.

If your cable carried only voice, then you need something that can give you up to 50 voice channels. In the telcom industry, there's the standard D4 channel bank, which gives 24 voice channels over a 1.544 Mb/s DS1 connection (some makes include two systems in one chassis). You'll need these at both ends, plus some means of placing the DS1 signal(s) on the fibre. The lowest bandwidth I've worked with on fibre, is DS3, which is 28 DS1s. An alternative, would be some sort of voice over IP configuration.

It's possible to use one fibre in both directions, by using different colour lasers.

James. I had a heck of a hard time splitting a single fiber strand

successful. Now

voice. What I need to know is if there is an

copper. I also

standard D4

configuration.

Thanks a lot for all of your input. While browsing the web for possible solutions I stumbled accross this site

, a 4-28 Channel Telephone/Analog/Data Fiber Optic Multiplexer. Would two of these do the job? I would have 56 channels available by going this route (two 28 channel units).

Thanks again for responding to my newby questions, I know you have a choice to respond of ignore them.

Actually, FTTx technologies that use a single fiber are using two wavelenghts (colors) downstream (voice is being packetized and sent as data) and one upstream for data return. Then there is DWDM with uses like 12 or 16 wavelengths per strand. But I don't deal with that stuff so I don't know too much about it.

It's difficult to comment on the applicability of this solution as we don't have all the information. If you do a straight cost analysis it may be cheaper to call in a company to do a directional bore between the buildings and lay in a new 50-pair or even a 100-pair direct burial cable than to replace the existing run with fiber. Bells and whistles are what makes the world go round, but it all gets down to how much are you willing to pay for the finish on the bell or whistle? Spending $10,000 for a $2,000 problem doesn't endear you to the financial people.

Rodgers Platt