The Sinking Feeling of a Kinked Buffer Tube

Express splicing and future cable additions are standard in today’s fiber to the home networks. In dense areas, trunk lines can pass through a closure every couple thousand feet, oftentimes with fiber counts in the 288 range or even higher. That’s a lot of buffer tubes to safely store as the network is built. 

Many closures on the market have the splice capacity needed. However, they lack the space for buffer tube storage or transition space from central core ribbon cables to individual trays.

Almost every splice technician has experienced the sinking feeling of a kinked tube from trying to pack tens of feet of tubes into a slack basket that’s barely large enough for the task. A kinked tube comes with the immediate unknown of whether or not the fibers inside survived and whether the whole splice has to be remade, costing hours of time and materials.

Even though cable manufacturers have improved tube bending performance over the years with material improvements and adjustments to wall thicknesses, every tube will eventually kink if bent too far. Why risk bending the tube when there are closures on the market with the capacity and ample space to route tubes? 

Hubbell’s splice closures were designed by former field technicians who saw a better way to build a closure. These closures not only have the capacity needed in many networks (up to 1728 for ribbon), there’s no sacrificing tray space to make room for buffer tube storage. Tubes simply make their way around the outside of the tray stack without fear of damage. Expressing tubes is made easy and re-entering the closure for future cable additions isn’t like the old snake-in-a-can prank.

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