FiberFault

This feature class stores the geographic location of a fault event on a fiber optic cable. Not all faults need to be marked with a fault feature, because some are quickly repaired. There are some cases in which damage to a cable is not so severe that an immediate repair needs to be made. This is a situation where it would be good to store the location of a damaging event so that it can be monitored for future degradation.

Fault locations can be used for tracking warranty issues with fiber optic cables, but these are rare cases. Fiber optic cables are much less likely to fail due to manufacturing issues, compared to underground electrical conductors. Most fault events are the result of an external force such as construction crews digging them up, animals chewing cables, vandalism or even the rare gun shot to a cable. This is not a required object and can be removed from the model if it does not provide value to an organization.

Attributes (required fields in red):

FaultCause: text - This describes the reason that the fault occurred in the system. This can be useful information in tracking persistent outage problems. The domain for this attribute, Fiber Fault Cause, should be modified to account for local threats to the fiber optic system. This is not a required filed, but is a useful field for tracking faults.

TestPoint: text - This stores the name or unique identifier of the location from which the OTDR trace was performed. Any useful location information can be added to this field. An editor may want to store the port number where the OTDR was performed from as well. This is not a required field.

TestDate: date - This is the date that the OTDR was performed to discover the location of the fault. This is not a required field.

OTDRDistanceFromTestPoint: double - This is the distance from the OTDR device. This is the glass length distance from the TestPoint to the fault location.

DefectiveFibers: text - This field can be used to list the damaged fibers. Future application functionality will allow a user to relate specific fibers to the FiberFault feature.

FiberOpticCableGlobalID: GUID - This field contains the GlobalID for the FiberOpticCable on which the fault has occurred.