A Fiber-Optic-Cable Connector

It is believed that splicing groups of optical fibers in the field will be necessary in fiber communication systems. Several investigators have successfully spliced individual fibers with various techniques. 1-4 Others have addressed themselves to splicing linear arrays of fibers. 5 While some aspects of linear array or fiber-ribbon splicing appear applicable to cable splicing in the field, the operations must be performed for each linear array in a fiber-optic cable. Good ends must be obtained for each fiber and, although techniques for accomplishing this are evolving, 6 still these represent additional operations required for each fiber or fiber group during cable splicing. Another potential problem in applying individual or small-group splicing to a fiber-optic cable is in reassembly of the spliced ribbons into a compact spliced cable. The individual connectors would have to be very thin, and the splices would have to be the same length to effect compact reassembly. The potential problems mentioned above stimulated investigation of another approach, cable splicing, by which we mean splicing all fibers of two cables by joining connector halves (terminations) formed on each cable end. 1547