ISE Magazine, January 2019

I S E I C T S O L U T I O N S E D U C AT I O N 8 A Hitch in the IoT In 2019 I see the IoT expanding at an alarming rate and I project that the infrastructure will fail to keep up with the demand More things are communicating with more things over the wired infrastructure the wireless infrastructure fiber infrastructure and yes the coaxial cable infrastructure If there is a disruption of any of the infrastructures then the IoT is affected Any down time on any of the 4 structures will have both immediate and long term effects on the IoT CONCERNS Network reliability is all important My concerns are many My first concern is the oldest copper infrastructure which is paper and pulp insulated cable pairs These cable pairs are used for bandwidth the IoT and line power for remotes and end user equipment There are thousands of miles of these large pulp and paper cables all over the world They typically range from smaller 25 and 50 pair cables to 3600 pair cables Most of these cables are in conduit runs from central offices in cities such as Chicago Dallas St Louis Miami and others Tons of data is transported on these old copper circuits Maintaining these cables is an expensive and arduous task Any failure is catastrophic to the IoT An ingress of water will put any pulp or paper cable out of business Hurricane Sandy is a prime example hundreds of these old cables failed and they were replaced with fiber under a disaster situation Not every telco will suffer a hurricane Therefore their pulp cables will have to be replaced with fiber at a huge expense over a much longer period of time In the meantime these old cables will have to be maintained A good air pressure program is a necessity and there are few skilled air pressure technicians Most have retired and those who are left are continuously pulled off of air pressure maintenance to handle the load When there is a failure the root cause of the failure needs to be located and repaired as soon as possible The problem is that there is no effective way to easily locate the fault In the old days the breakdown test set provided a means to find the fault in short order The test set put out 630VDC to ionize the fault making it easy to locate There is no way that high DC voltage can be used in todays environment It is too dangerous to field technicians If you have a breakdown test set I advise that you get rid of it before someone gets injured or killed To locate the fault technicians have to use the divide and conquer method of troubleshooting They open the cable and cut the pair in half and then test it both ways to see which way the fault is They keep doing that until they find the fault What took only hours in the old breakdown test set days will take days to find in todays environment COPPER EXPERT dmccarty@ mccartyinc com For more information email or visit www mccartyinc com Don McCarty is the Copper Expert columnist for ISE magazine discussing the issues around provisioning testing and maintaining copper for all services from POTs to IPTV Don is also President of and the Lead Trainer for McCarty Products a technical training and products company training field technicians cable maintenance installation repair and Central Office technicians and managers