It is a good article. It is missing a few points: If you are going to do the full efford of cleaning and then microscope each connector, you would also want to finish off by doing a OTDR scan of the link. This is your documentation for a clean link. Always use optics that can monitor the signal level. The reality is that best practice, as described in the article, will not always be followed. In most case you will be good anyway as long your optics report back a signal strength with a good margin. Have your automated monitoring system watch over those signal levels. Slightly dirty connectors will often give a sufficient link quality anyway if you have plenty of power budget to spare. We use many 1G single mode BIDI optics which cost about 10 USD each for 20 km modules and most of the links are only 1-5 km. The customer end of those links are probably all half dirty, but nobody cares as long we get a strong signal back with power budget to spare. Regards, Baldur On 09/21/2016 07:56 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
https://www.sunet.se/blogg/long-read-cleanliness-is-a-virtue/
This is an excellent article regarding fiber cleaning and its importance. Please do share with other people in our business. I'm sure lack of proper fiber cleaning causes a lot of unneccessary outages and operational problems worldwide, partly because people aren't aware of its importance.