You’ve heard of “dust caps” used to protect the end-faces of network cabling (see the image to the left). But did you know that it’s actually a misnomer?

In fact, dust caps, or protective end caps, do very little to protect the fiber optic end-face from dust contamination.

Why? Because dust particles are very small – they will already be on the inside of the cap when the cap inserted on the cable at the factory. While most manufacturers do their best to maintain clean end-faces during the manufacturing process, there is no guarantee that there is not dust inside the cap when it goes on. When the cap has been put on, that dust can very easily migrate to the cable end-face and cause major issues.

End-face contamination can bring an entire network down. A word to the wise: inspect, clean and inspect again to make sure your cable end-faces aren’t contaminated. Learn more about fiber optic cable end-face cleaning.

Dust-Free Manufacturing Environment for Cables – Why It’s Important

When it comes to fiber optics in the data center, dust contamination is no joke.

Consider this: the average “speck” of dust measures 7µ (7 microns). For comparison, the core of 9/125 single mode fiber is only 9µ! While most fiber optic connectivity in a data center is 50µ, it’s still pretty clear that dust and fiber optic connectivity are not a good match. Dust in the wrong place can lead to downtime, and nobody wants that.

So what can you do about keeping things dust-free and working properly?

Clean and inspect your end-faces. We have a lot of material on this topic and I encourage you to check it out .

But what I really want to talk about is what we can do about dust contamination for you. Because of the internal fiber cable assemblies with LC, SC and MTP® connections inside the module, there is a possibility of dust-contamination before new modules even land on your doorstep. To ensure your product is manufactured with no issues, we invested in a dust-free environment at our manufacturing center.

In our modular dust-free environment, we assemble modules for our Skinny-Trunk® Solution products, like the RSD-Series and H-Series enclosures.

There are no standards or mandates that this be done – we installed a dust-free environment because it aligns with our mission in helping you make your network…work.

Here are the stats for the dust free environment:

• 320 square-feet of space
• 6 HEPA filters remove 99.99% of the particulates in the air
• Remaining air particulates are less than .3µ

This makes dust contamination much more manageable and helps us eliminate potential contamination issues for our customers.

Check out our recent webinar on fiber optic end face contamination, presented by Brian Teague of US Conec Ltd. Contamination causes over 50% of network outages, and it can be easily avoided. Learn how in this presentation.

In this webinar you will learn:

• Applicable standards
• Contamination overview
• Best practices
• Cleaning options

Check out the latest edition of Cable Talk, where JT discusses how end-face contamination can cause network downtime in the data center: