A business center for internationally operating entrepreneurs, the original Exchange-WTC building dating back to the mid-1930’s was extended with a stylish elliptical shaped tower in 1987. The 93 meter high tower with its 25 floors and 6 elevators is now fully equipped for the future with a ready-to-connect backbone of fibers for ultra-fast broadband communications.

“Upgrading landmark high rise buildings used to be quite a challenge until we developed RiserNetXS”, says Donald Brass, Product Manager EMEA Draka Telecom Solutions.” Now it’s a speedy process requiring little specialised manpower, bringing additional value to the building as this technique requires minimum effort to add business center tenants to the backbone when they are ready.”

Draka engineered the RiserNetXS technique to ease the task of modernising older generation mid- and high rise buildings requiring dense concentrations of broadband access points. The Draka solution consists of a slim, tough outer sheath of, flame-retardant cables filled with dialetric reinforcement and housing 6 Draka BendBrightXS optical fibers. These internal fibers are color coded to facilitate installation on each floor. This design provides enhanced strain resistance without compromising the benefits of simple, direct, field termination.

A special feature of these indoor riser cables is the optical fiber breakout unit system that allows for fiber retractions of up to 20m. The solution makes use of window cuts along the cable allowing individual fiber modules to be cut and pulled back through an earlier window on another floor level. Color identified fibers are then easily pushed through separate microducts on the new floor, ready to be brought to a termination or distribution point within the customer premises. The use of flexible micro-modules provides easier storage, faster installation and access to the fibers without the need for special tools.

Draka BendBrightXS fibers are a key part of this solution – they have the flexibility to be pushed, pulled, bent, branched and handled in ways that allow easy manipulation for installation, without degrading the transmission signal. With ultra bend-insensitive fibers making their way into some of the most demanding Multi-Dwelling Unit (MDU) environments, these modern fiber solutions offer an excellent ratio between cost and bend loss performance.

Source: Draka, donald.brass@draka.com