Solutions for Central Office and Headend| Corning

The central office or headend is the heart of your network that has to house, organize, and manage an ever increasing amount of fiber to cope with exploding bandwidth demand. With reliability being critical, you need products that optimise your network's capabilities during construction, operations, and that are capable for future extension. 
Our solutions simplify the design and deployment of your central office or headend, combining reliability and superior cable and patchcord management with the need for higher density and quicker installation at the lowest cost of ownership.

The Centrix solution is a high-density fiber management system that provides a balance of industry leading density with innovative patchcord routing. The system can be deployed in multiple applications including central office, headend, FTTx and data center.

It supports up to 4,320 LC or 2,880 SC connector ports per 7ft / 2200mm frame. As quad configuration it provides a density of 16.000 ports per square meter.

Centrix is offered in a Front Access Cabinet that allows back-to-back configurations or mounting against a wall. The cabinet design provides optimized routing paths for patch cords, reducing the risk of pileup or entanglement. When using single-fiber patch cord for patching, Corning recommends the use of 4 m long 1.6 mm patch cords in a single cabinet or for groups of up to 4 cabinets.

The foundation of Centrix is a cassette that can be tailored to include a variety of optical devices (splitter, WDM, attenuators etc.) providing flexibility and functionality within a single frame without sacrificing density.

Each cassette contains fiber guiding elements, a splice section and holds up to 24 SC or 36 LC connector adapters. Easy port access is possible due to a sliding cassette with drop-down handle. Housings can be ordered empty or pre-loaded with cassettes for on-frame splicing and are available as 1RU (holding 3 cassettes), 2RU (6 cassettes) and 4RU (12 cassettes).

Some areas of your network require the highest protection standards either as your customers (e.g. banking institutes) demand special link integrity or as the impact of failure influences large portions of your data traffic as it is typically the case in Core Fiber Nodes.

To address these special needs Corning’s PasMAX has been designed with single fiber management as the primary design feature in a configurable housing that offers a patch and splice housing with a variety of options to meet your installation needs.

PasMAX is capitalizing on the flexibility and reliability of Corning’s MAX tray splicing system, the splice trays allow for individual fiber access and maintenance without interrupting service of adjacent fibers.

The PasMAX housing trays rotate and so it is designed for installation onto frames of racks with free rear access or onto frames with limited rear access. To minimize risk of operations it combines patch- and splice section; each separately accessible; protecting fibers in specially designed protection channels. Front accessible rotating shelves offers a unique individual “pop up” access connector area. The splice area can be accessed seaparately. A section to strain relief and guide single fiber cables allows for direct “splice-through” connection in case customers request a permanent splice (prohibiting usage of connectors in their links).

Corning Optical Communications offers to pre-terminate fiber pigtails (900µm) to minimize your installation time. For additional security PasMAX cabinets are available with lockable doors, side walls and roof to limit access to the system to authorized persons only.

Open Frame: Easy-access architecture that keeps on growing

The RFO (OF) Open Frame is built for high-capacity growth – for scalability from 1,000 to more than 100,000 fiber points – making it ideal for consolidation and interface between the central office, head end or data center and outdoor fiber networks. These single- or double-sided modular frames can be linked together for as large a system as your space will allow, maintaining superior cross connection across the total lineup as it expands.

The open-frame architecture also helps eliminate access issues and the problems they can present. You maintain complete control over cables, patch cords and accessories from all four sides of the frame for cabling and jumpering operations and control of slack, “kink,” “banjo” and other bend radius issues.

As Central Offices/headends run into physical constraints, wavelength-division multiplexers (WDM) solutions become critical in maximizing the density and functionality required for modern optical distribution networks. Download the WDM technology brochure to learn more about the leading technologies allowing network operators to increase network density.