On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 06:12:12PM -0400, Dave Cohen wrote:
There is a middle ground between ???not managing customer light??? and ???not managing anything??? though. The Adva ALM solution that a few folks that have mentioned, along with others like Lucent SmartLGX, effectively bridge this gap by helping trace the precise location of cuts and even smaller scale incidents like microbends to expedite diagnosis and repair to the extent possible. It???s not a panacea and definitely not a substitute for managing the hardware at the endpoints, but it does improve operational responsiveness in a measurable way. And yes, there are dark fiber providers in the Northeast that leverage this technology, at least on some portion of their fiber plants.
Agreed that there is a middle ground. Devices like these are something that customers can individually deploy on their lit fibers (then again, many optical vendors now include automatic fault location (e.g. OTDR function) into their line interface cards with OSC add/drop filters (e.g. Ciena ESAM, etc).) And ofcourse, I think it's great for carriers to deploy these on their own internal circuits for telemetry purposes and improve fault location response. But as far as dark fiber pair that's being leased out to an end-user customer or another entity, I for one, do not want any carrier equipment whatsoever on any fiber spans we obtain from another party (be it fiber swap with a carrier, or leased segment otherwise), full stop. Everything else besides glass is more attenuation to me, and with data center MMRs along the eway, there are already enough insertion losses as is. James