Patent Application
20210090764
This application relates to a modified composite copper/fiber cable. More particularly, this application relates to fiber optic components positioned within cable fillers.
In the prior art, there are at least two markets that require a combination of copper twisted-pairs and fiber optic signal transmissions as well as power supply cables. These markets are 4G/5G cell phone telecommunications and military installations. For example, in one prior art arrangement for 5G cellular applications, separate cables, such as a category copper cables, fiber optic cables and separate power cables are all used in parallel to support multiple types of equipment located close to the antennas
Another possibility for supporting such equipment is to provide category/copper cables along with separate fiber/power cables with fiber and power components included within a single jacket, as illustrated in prior art
Other markets that require robust power and communication signal connections is the military market. Here there are applications for cables with both fiber and copper twisted pairs. The fibers are used to sense any physical movement of the structured cabling as part of the intrusion detection system. The copper twisted pairs are simultaneously used to provide the Ethernet data (VoIP phone, IP Camera, Network Connection, etc. . . . ) and power over Ethernet (PoE) and the fiber would be used for the sensing application.
The needs highlighted demonstrate different situations that require various cabling/connections for power, combined with copper signal cables and/or fiber signal connections. Such connections may be for high bandwidth devices to be remotely powered and thus require either a composite cable with copper conductors and fiber optics strands or two or more separate cables. Moreover, such composite and/or hybrid cables have significant costs in terms of installation labor and the amount of space taken up in pathways. Regarding security as discussed above, systems employing such cable bundles typically include a single “sensor” fiber cable per bundle/pathway to detect cable intrusions (i.e. in military settings). However, such arrangements using a separate fiber cable per pathway are unable to track intrusion to a single cable, only to the cable pathway as a whole such as a conduit, tray, duct, etc. . . . .
The present arrangement overcomes the drawbacks associated with the prior art and provides a copper/fiber cable that uses twisted pair copper conductors for data transmission (1000BASE-T, 10GBASE-T, etc. . . . ) and power (PoE, LV DC, LV AC, PoDL, etc. . . . ) rather than just power. Also included within the power/copper cables, are fiber optic elements that can be used for either additional signal communications and/or intrusion detection, where the fiber components can be used to measure other characteristics such as temperature, stress, strain or pressure.
Unlike the prior art, where the fiber elements are separately insulated/buffered within the same jacket as the twisted pairs, the present optical fiber components are instead included inside the filler(s) traditionally present in any case in the category rated twisted-pair cables (e.g. CAT6, CAT6A, etc. . . . ) Such an arrangement for the optical fiber elements results in less space being consumed in the pathway and the movements (or other characteristics) of individual category cables being tracked.
Such an arrangement, allows not only for lower overall diameters for cables that contain all of copper signal transmission, fiber signal transmission, and power, particularly relative to traditional composite cables with fiber components are separately jacketed components in traditional tubing/buffering. Moreover, as each of such cables would include at least one fiber element, when used in high security situations, every cable would have at least one fiber element that could be used for cable-by-cable intrusion detection.
To this end a signal and power cable is provided with a plurality of twisted pair conductor elements, at least one of which is configured for power transmission and at least one of which is configured for signal transmission. At least one cable filler element is configured to at least partially separate one of the plurality of twisted pairs from another, the at least one cable filler element having at least one hollow opening. At least one optical fiber, the at least on optical fiber positioned within the at least one hollow opening of the at least one cable filler element.
The present invention can be best understood through the following description and accompanying drawing, wherein:
In one embodiment of the present invention as shown in
In one arrangement, cable 10 may be configured to operate as a PoE cable with one or two of twisted pairs 12 used for power and two or three of pairs 12 used for category level signal communication. It is understood that such cable 10 and the various pairs 12 may be configured to support PoE in any of its various incarnations. For example, for cables 10 designed to carry 10/100 mbps traffic, there are two powering schemes. In one arrangement, two pairs 12 are used for data transmission and the other pairs 12 are used for power transmission (this is sometimes referred to as the ‘spare pair’ powering scheme). In another PoE arrangement two pairs 12 are unused and the other two pairs 12 are used for both data and power. In other PoE arrangements for 1 Gbps and faster speeds, all four pairs 12 pairs are used for data and either two or four of pairs 12 are simultaneously used for data and power depending on the power level (e.g. PoE (12.95 W delivered to the device) and PoE+(25.5 W delivered to the device) use only two pairs). In yet another arrangement, cable 10 can use its pairs 12 in a PoE++that delivers up to ˜90 W using all four pairs 12 in cable 10. It is understood that any such powering arrangement for the pairs 12 of cable 10 may employed in each embodiment as applicable.
As shown in
It is understood that
In another embodiment as shown in
In another embodiment as shown in
In one embodiment as shown in 5, a cable 10C is shown having twisted pairs 12 and a separator 14C that is a mix between the embodiments from
In one embodiment as shown in
While only certain features of the invention have been illustrated and described herein, many modifications, substitutions, changes or equivalents will now occur to those skilled in the art. It is therefore, to be understood that this application is intended to cover all such modifications and changes that fall within the true spirit of the invention.
