Air Blown Fiber Optic Cabling Solutions

Sumitomo Electric Lightwave Future Flex

FutureFLEX, the first and most technologically proven air-blown fiber system in North America, has become the preferred infrastructure for many of the world’s foremost enterprise networks including: the Pentagon, CNN, ESPN, Johns Hopkins
University, Mayo Clinic, Starbucks Coffee, Washington DC Convention Center, Intel, Nissan, McCarran International Airport – Las Vegas, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, MGM Grand, Atlanta Motor Speedway, and many more.

Why Choose An Air Blown Fiber Optic Solution?

An Air Blown Fiber Optic System provides several advantages over a traditional fiber optic distibution system.

An ABF system allows to scale your network, control network capacity, optimize conduit space, meet your bandwidth requirements quickly, save significant labor and overall project costs, and upgrade your network at the as emerging technologies become available.

You can scale you network qucikly and easily. Think of this system as "fiber on demand", install any fiber type where and when you need it quickly. Install fiber optic links in minutes or hours versus days and weeks of traditional fiber optic installations.

Install fiber easily in hard-to-reach, limited access or secure/sensitive areas.

Install new fiber with disruption to productivity or network operations.

Eliminate guess work of forecasting future needs and wasted capital costs in over or under building the fiber optic infrastructure.

Eliminate risk of install fiber that will not support emerging or future technologies.

Maximize your initial infrastrucutre investment. Fiber bundles can be blown out quickly and easily and replaced with a new fiber type in virtually minutes — allowing you to reuse the old fiber for another application in your network.

Control network capacity by optimizing conduit space. Two 19-tube air-blown fiber cables yield 38 pathways within the same conduit space in which conventional cables yield only 3 — meaning that you should never again face the cost or need to lay additional conduit. Also, you know with complete certainty at every moment how much capacity you have left for the future expansion of your network.

Increase the reliability of your network through FutureFLEX's splice-free, point-to-point infrastructure by eliminating the risk of fiber damage that can occur when pulling conventional cable and decreasing attenuation for maximum signal integrity.

Eliminate the headaches of forecasting technological changes and the future requirements of your network so you can pursue the other demands of your job — knowing that with FutureFLEX you will experience instantaneously quick upgrades, fast project turnaround times, elimination of construction coordination, less downtime, and lower departmental costs with continuously positive ROI.

How the FutureFlex works:

The easiest way to understand the full range of benefits offered by the FutureFLEX Cabling System is to understand how it works.

Instead of pulling standard cable, the FutureFLEX Cabling System uses a patented blowing method. A compact fiber bundle, available in a variety of configurations, is blown through a tube, the pressure source is either compressed air or bottles of compressed nitrogen, at speeds of 100 to 150 feet per minute to anywhere in the LAN you want it to go.

The heart of the system is a highway of tube cable that is installed in place of traditional innerduct. The tube cable replaces conduit, innerduct and pull boxes. A variety of tube styles is available, with versions designed to meet the requirements for use in plenum, riser, general purpose and outdoor applications. Outside plant FutureFLEX cables are designed to inhibit water intrusion and can be steel armored for direct burial applications.

FutureFLEX Air Blown Fiber is easy to install. It makes turns easily and installs simply into an existing conduit infrastructure. Once the tube cable highway is in place, the fiber installation takes only minutes, with minimal labor. Spare tubes are added during the initial installation. So any time you want to add fiber or make changes in the network, you easily can. The blowing method and tube design allows you to change the network simply by blowing the fiber out, rerouting the tubing at patching intersection points and blowing the fiber back into the new network configuration. The process is simple, fast and keeps installation costs down to a fraction of what they would be to pull new fiber optic cable.

FutureFLEX ABF uses the same type of glass as conventional fiber optic cables, as well as the same connection and termination. It complies with all premises networking media standards. The FutureFLEX fiber optic cable is smaller than comparable conventional fiber cable, typically 1/40th the size. There’s no pulling force with air blown fiber installation, which means there is little chance of damage. This eliminates the need for bulky strength elements, fillers or tensile strength members found in traditional cable.

The fiber bundles have an aerodynamically designed jacket. The specialized material that sheaths the fiber bundle provides an irregular surface, much like the dimples on a golf ball that catches the air to propel the fiber through the tube. With FutureFLEX ABF, two people can install one mile of cable in 45 minutes. With conventional cable, it takes six to eight people from two to three days at a minimum to pull a single mile of cable.

At each patching intersection, tube cable cells are joined in a protective housing called a tube distribution unit (TDU). TDUs can be placed wherever a fiber termination cabinet would be placed and can take many forms, including wall-mounted boxes for indoor use and watertight boxes with splice cases for out-door use. The TDU provides an access point for connecting tube segments and for future rerouting of the system. It’s this point-to-point system that eliminates splicing except at the end points — saving time and money.

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