“Tombigbee Fiber, LLC, belongs to Tombigbee Electric Power Association, a member-owned co-op that services an area in northern Mississippi and has been doing so for over 90 years. In 2019, our board of directors voted to provide high-speed fiber optic-based internet to all its members. This would involve installing about 4,000 miles of fiber optic infrastructure. To minimize costs and ensure we delivered the best services possible to our members, we looked at a number of solutions.
We discovered there were a lot of products available on the market to use in building out our network, which would be built based on a centralized split design. For the last mile products, we began our network buildout with mechanically terminated fiber optic connectors.
We experienced failure rates that were considered average for that type of product. But when we learned about another option that would have a much lower failure rate, deliver better performance, and offer a longer life, we decided to take a look.
We brought in UCL Swift for a demo of their products and to see how they could deliver a better solution than what we were using at that time. UCL Swift came in and demonstrated their KF4A-HDC cladding alignment fusion splicer and performed terminations of their SC/APC connector. We were surprised by how simple the KF4A-HDC was to operate and how quickly it worked.
UCL Swift has an excellent reputation in the industry for supplying high-quality products and for supporting them well. We reviewed their products and found that by using their SC/APC fusion splice-on connectors at the tap end and at the NID on the residence side, we could cut our drops to the exact length we wanted and eliminate a lot of cable waste.
This, we found, was just one of the benefits.
By making our own drops, we also didn’t have to purchase and stock pre-terminated assemblies of various lengths. With made-to-length drops, it also allowed us to dramatically reduce the size of our enclosures and other cable storage devices, further reducing costs.
And, as is common with fusion splicing versus mechanical splicing, we found that drop failure rates declined dramatically. We experienced a failure rate of about 10% with mechanical connectors. When we switched to UCL Swift fusion splice-on connectors, that failure rate fell to less than 1%. Returning to repair previously installed drops added significant cost to our network rollout and slowed the rollout process by redirecting technicians, both undesirable. We believe we can reduce that 1% failure rate even further with training.
Fusion splicing is undoubtedly the best method for doing fiber optic terminations. Repair work is also easy to do and, again, the performance and reliability of the rework is greater than other methods we looked at. Ultimately, switching from mechanical connectors to UCL Swift fusion splice-on connectors gave us tremendous cost savings over the course of the project, which reduced overall expense to our membership.
As we adopted the UCL Swift solution, we were also amazed at how quickly our technicians mastered the KF4A-HDC fusion splicers from UCL Swift. Its compact size and robust traveling case are definitely technician-friendly. UCL Swift provided training for all our technicians, and within hours of being handed the fusion splicers, they were ready to hit the streets. This was amazing.
Their fusion splicers are well-built and intuitively engineered. The three-year warranty was reassuring, and we found the costs associated with tooling up our team were easily justifiable based on the savings we saw immediately upon adopting their solution. UCL Swift splice-on connectors are now our standard termination method.”
Matt Fennell
Manager of Fiber Services, Tombigbee Fiber, LLC
