EXFO

EXFO is a company that designs and manufactures test and service assurance instruments for fixed and mobile telecom networks. Its products include optical, transport, datacom, 3G, LTE, copper, xDSL, IMS and VoIP test platforms used by network operators and network equipment manufacturers to assess the telecom infrastructure and the telecom services carried on it. EXFO is headquartered in Quebec City, Canada and has approximately over 1200 employees worldwide.

Founding

EXFO was founded in 1985 in Quebec City (Canada) by Germain Lamonde and Robert Tremblay. Its original products were portable testing products for optical networks. In 1996, EXFO started designing products for optical component and optical system R&D and manufacturing. The company has since added 3G, LTE, protocol, copper/xDSL, IMS and VoIP test and service assurance products, mainly through acquisitions.

Acquisitions

ByteSphere LLC, Boston, US [Date: April 1, 2014]

ByteSphere’s solutions feature advanced patented techniques for infrastructure performance management, including network element polling and fault management. ByteSphere’s products and tools are used by some of the world’s largest tier-1 network operators and Fortune Global 500 companies.

Optical fiber

An optical fiber (or optical fibre) is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than wire cables. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with lesser amounts of loss; in addition, fibers are also immune to electromagnetic interference, a problem from which metal wires suffer excessively. Fibers are also used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so that they may be used to carry images, thus allowing viewing in confined spaces, as in the case of a fiberscope. Specially designed fibers are also used for a variety of other applications, some of them being fiber optic sensors and fiber lasers.

Optical fibers typically include a transparent core surrounded by a transparent cladding material with a lower index of refraction. Light is kept in the core by the phenomenon of total internal reflection which causes the fiber to act as a waveguide. Fibers that support many propagation paths or transverse modes are called multi-mode fibers (MMF), while those that support a single mode are called single-mode fibers (SMF). Multi-mode fibers generally have a wider core diameter and are used for short-distance communication links and for applications where high power must be transmitted. Single-mode fibers are used for most communication links longer than 1,000 meters (3,300 ft).

Optical time-domain reflectometer

An optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR) is an optoelectronic instrument used to characterize an optical fiber. An OTDR is the optical equivalent of an electronic time domain reflectometer. It injects a series of optical pulses into the fiber under test and extracts, from the same end of the fiber, light that is scattered (Rayleigh backscatter) or reflected back from points along the fiber. The scattered or reflected light that is gathered back is used to characterize the optical fiber. This is equivalent to the way that an electronic time-domain meter measures reflections caused by changes in the impedance of the cable under test. The strength of the return pulses is measured and integrated as a function of time, and plotted as a function of fiber length.

Reliability and quality of OTDR equipment

The reliability and quality of an OTDR is based on its accuracy, measurement range, ability to resolve and measure closely spaced events, measurement speed, and ability to perform satisfactorily under various environmental extremes and after various types of physical abuse. The instrument is also judged on the basis of its cost, features provided, size, weight, and ease of use.