Choosing Fiber Optic Enclosures and Adapter Plates
As we recently discussed, we have a wide variety of fiber optic enclosures and adapter plates to fit your needs. How do you choose? In this article, we’ll go through a couple of scenarios to help you determine your equipment needs.
To select an enclosure, you need to know your available space, the type of connector you are using, your fiber type, and the number of terminations you will need.
Example 1: Wall Mount Enclosure, 12 Strand Multimode Micro Distribution x 4 Cables, LC Connectors
In this scenario, your installation requires you to terminate 4 runs of multimode 12 strand Micro Distribution fiber. Only one end of each of the 4 cables will be terminated into a wall enclosure. You are using LC connectors.
In this case, because you have 4 runs of 12 strand fiber, you will have 48 terminations entering the wall enclosure. (Including both ends of the fiber, you would have 96 total terminations, but we are only dealing with the half entering the enclosure.)
To accommodate the 48 LC connectors on your fiber, you would need 48 total adapter ports. We have adapter plate options that accommodate 12 or 24 LC connectors. This means that you would need either 4 x 12 port adapter plates, or 2 x 24 adapter plates.
Because the cable is multimode, you would choose the adapter plates for multimode fiber, which are color-coded for easy identification.
To use the least amount of space, you choose 2 x 24 port adapter plates. This means your enclosure must accommodate at minimum two plates. In this case, you could choose the SSF-SWM-SPLIT-WL-E2 wall enclosure, as it fits two plates. You could also choose the next size up (SSF-MWM-SPLIT-WL-E4) and fill the two additional spaces with blank plates to allow for future installations in the same space.
You can then plug in your fiber terminations into one side of your plate, meeting either patch cables exiting the enclosure, or other cables. We’ll put patch cables in the equipment list as an example.
Your equipment list is:
- 4 runs x 12 strand multimode micro distribution cable
- 96 LC connectors (terminating both ends of cable; half of the ends are going in the enclosure)
- 2 x SSF-LC24-MM-OM3-4 adapter plates
- 1 x SSF-SWM-SPLIT-WL-E2
- 24 x Duplex (2 fiber) LC-LC multimode patch cables
Example 2: Rack Enclosures, 6 Strand Single Mode Micro Distribution x 8 Cables, SC Connectors
In this scenario, you have 8 runs of 6 strand cable single mode. Each cable will be terminated with SC connectors. In this case, both ends of the cable being terminated into different equipment racks, so you will need at least 2 different rack enclosures.
First, again, you need to know the total number of connectors. In this case 6 strands of fiber means you will have 12 total terminations per cable. Since you have 8 cable runs, you will have 96 total connectors.
Half of these connections will terminate into each enclosure, so you will need 48 ports per rack enclosure.
SC connectors are larger than LC connectors, so you will need more plates to accommodate all your connectors. The highest number of SC connectors per LGX plate is 12, so you will need at minimum 4 adapter plates per rack enclosure.
The smallest rack enclosure that will accommodate 4 plates is the SSF-2RU-E6. This has 6 plate openings, so you may wish to include 2 x blank plates to prevent dust incursion on the 2 open plate positions.
You can then plug in your fiber termination into one side of your plate, meeting either patch cables exiting the enclosure, or another cable. We’ll put patch cables in the equipment list as an example.
Your equipment list is:
- 8 lengths of 6 Strand Single Mode Micro Distribution
- 96 x SC connectors
- 8 x SSF-SC12-SM-OS2 Adapter plates (4 plates per enclosure)
- 4 x SSF-BLANK (2 blank plates per enclosure)
- 2 x SSF-2RU-E6 (2 enclosures)
- 48 x Duplex (2 fiber) single mode SC patch cables
