Importance

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Abstract

Environmental conditions, such as temperature or wind load, may cause a fiber-optic link to expand or contract, resulting in upstream communications drift. Current methods compensate for such drift assuming it is caused by environmental conditions; however, these methods cannot determine abnormal behavior due to fiber faults that magnify the effect of environmental changes. An example embodiment of the invention provides a method and corresponding apparatus for detecting abnormal drift behavior in a passive optical network (PON) and may include monitoring a metric representative of drift of upstream communications for an optical network unit (ONU) in a PON. The example method may detect and report abnormal behavior in the PON that cannot be fully attributed to “normal” environmental conditions, and indicate a possible fiber cable fault. An ability to detect fiber link faults may allow a system operator to proactively maintain the physical fiber before service interruptions affect an end-user.

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First Claim