Moving fibre trunks: interruptions?

Fri Sep 1 18:44:23 UTC 2017

I'd expect at least a couple of hours of outage while the cable is reconnected.

When doing the move on the live cable (assuming 1 cable). There will
be a splicing crew at each end of the move. They will then break a
tube or ribbon at a time and splice into the new cable.

Splicing unused portions of the cable and then moving patches is also
done. In my experience, it's much more common to resplice on the
existing strands.

A large cable will take quite a while to resplice, likely more than
just overnight depending on the size of the cable.

Jay

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei
<jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca> wrote:
>
> A large highway interchange is being rebuilt in Montréal (Turcot) and
> this requires that the CN mainline tracks out of downtown be moved a few
> hundred metres to the north for a couple of kilometres until it rejoins
> the existing alignment.
>
> Part of the contract involves the cost of moving the fibre trunks along
> with the tracks. (old alignment will become commercial properties).
>
>
> So they have new cable that goes through the new alignment and joins the
> old one at both ends.  So they'll have hundreds of strands to splice.
>
> When doing that type of work, how much downtime can be expected for each
> strand?
>
> Would they typically use patch panels in central offices to move a
> customer to a spare strand while they splice their assigned strand to
> use the new cable segment (and then move traffic back to that assigned
> strand?). Or would they switch customers around to new strands and
> update their documentation on which customer is on which strand?
>
> Or do they do nothing at patch panels in COs and just take whatever time
> it is needed to have crews at both ends of the work site splice each
> strand at same time (I assume about 5 minutes outage for each strand?)
>
>
> Would they normally involve the customer advising them of upcoming
> outage? Would the folks working trackside be limited to overnight hours
> to make outages less significant, or do they work around the clock ?
>