[cyptus]

_minimum_ bend?

[zygentoma]

minimum bend _radius_

A straight cable has an infinite radius, the more bend the smaller the radius

[hinkley]

Though if it is on or under the surface of the earth, “straight” will be a bend radius of around 6,370km. We don’t make a lot of buildings that deal with this but transcontinental or transoceanic cables certainly do. If someone designed a fiber that required absolutely no bend in order to work you’d have to use it in buildings or dig much deeper holes.

There was an encoding mechanism proposed about 10-15 years ago that used spirally polarized light to carry more channels, but it required the surface of the fiber to be polished to a much higher degree than existing cables in order for the light to go around bends properly.

[numpad0]

Fibers can be bent to a radius of an inch or so, that's the tolerated minimum bend radius.

I guess you could call it "the maximum sharpness tangency" or something like that, but that's not the standard verbiage.

[DannyBee]

G.657A1, which is basically the crappiest you would ever buy at this point, is not even half an inch bend radius.

[Etheryte]

Minimum bend radius.

[quickthrowman]

It’s usually 20x the outer diameter of the cable for fiber, a cable with a .3 inch OD has a 6 inch minimum bend radius.

[DannyBee]

What?

This is 100% wrong.

This is well standardized. As I posted elsewhere:

G.657A1/B1 = 10mm (half an inch)

G.657A2/B2 = 7.5mm (a little over a quarter inch)

G.657A3/B3 = 2.5mm (less than 1/8th of an inch)

The only cable you will find with a 6 inch bend radius is going to be armored interlocking fiber cable or something.

You can take 2mm G657.A3 fiber cable, wrap it around a pencil, and it will work 100% fine.

Even old G652 cable only had a 1 inch bend radius.