As long as no one touches the end fibre faces (ferrules) then there is little to no contamination risk. If you do then fibre cleaner as said. Fibre is pretty tough really. At the end of the day it either works or it doesn't.

The DFB type lasers used in PON equipment are purposely eye-safe lasers. Still probably not a good idea to go looking down a live PON fibre if you can help it.

In reply to a post by ryan125_hst:

How do you split a PON in two? I guess you would need a spare fibre to feed into a second splitter, and then put 16 prems on each? That would cause service disruption to some of the prems while the switchover occured?

Or if you have one or two bandwidth hogs spoiling the service for everyone else, you move *their* line(s) onto another PON, in which case they're the only ones who are disrupted.

In reply to a post by ryan125_hst:

In reply to a post by Taras:

even going to xgs-pon shouldn't be an issue in terms of cpe install. Its a shame theres no combined gpon/xgs-pon ont, as you could move users dynamically between the two depending on bandwidth needs .

On that note how does a GPON service get upgraded to XGS-PON without long outages as presumably the OLT line cards all need changing out? The customer's ONT can stay as you can have GPON and XGS-PON running at the same time but if the line cards only had GPON originally, there must be disruption for a few hours to swap it over?

Thats assuming the olt isn't ready for xgs-pon now. Also why would it be a long outage ?

In reply to a post by ryan125_hst:

Doesn't that risk the customer damaging the fibre cable during the swap? What about the risk of them looking down the fibre and the laser shining at their eyes?

People already damage the fibre when they rip the ONT off the wall by pushing a vacuum cleaner into it. It you give the choice of swapping the ONT yourself to let you upgrade in 2-3 days vs. having to wait 14 days for an engineer appointment and take time off work then people who feel comfortable plugging the fibre in themselves will be able to go with that option.

In reply to a post by jpm:

people who feel comfortable plugging the fibre in themselves

to the average person a fibre SC type connector will feel like any other computer or smart phone connection, just one they've not seen before. Self install is now common for Virgin Media coax where the connection point was known to have been recently in use (ie, latest lightning supression etc).

LC for VM currently. Bucking trend 😂

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

LC for VM currently. Bucking trend 😂

Ahh, the smaller version; probably what I used last on SAN kit, when I last went to our data centre.

LC of the duplex varietal is pretty common on LAN kit and adapters too. Just blue rather than green as here.