Eye protection in DWDM systems -- what threshold?

Tue Jun 9 21:44:53 UTC 2009

Deepak Jain wrote:
 > Does anyone *use* any eye protection (other that not looking at the
> light, turning off the light etc) -- I mean like protective goggles,
> etc, when doing simple things like adding/removing patch cables from an
> SMF patch panel.

There are osha requirements and ansi standards.

    ANSI Z136.1 - Safe Use of Lasers
    ANSI Z136.2 - Safe Use of Lasers in Optical Fiber Communication
	Systems Utilizing Laser Diode and LED Sources

> I get that if you *know* the gear you are using has a Class 3 laser on
> it, you should be careful... but when you are patching it into a
> building's cable plant and some schmuck is patching the last leg in for
> you (or has pulled it accidentally, etc).. um, "don't look at it" is our
> community's BCP?

Actually that's pretty much the requirement for 3r, for 3b and 4 the
requirements for eye protection and manual safety systems are much
higher. All this high power stuff is rather rare (your cisco ons for
example is a class 1 laser product), unless you terminate one end of a
submarine system you'll likely never see a class 4 laser in this context.

I tend to carry around extra dust protection boots in the tool bag to
recover the exposed sc/st plugs that seem to accumulate in panels that
people touch a lot, mostly, it protects the ends of the ferrules.

> DJ
> 