Comment by rezonant
10 days ago
Yes its a huge benefit. Of course without an NMOS SDN solution, actually reliably routing so much data over a network (especially if incrementally designed) is a huge pain in the ass. But thankfully we have those systems now.
We sort of traded the big expensive SDI switchers for big expensive SDNs
Also, I guess we traded a ton of coax cable for somewhat more manageable single-mode fiber. :-)
I never fully understood why SDI over fiber remains so niche, e.g. UHD people would rather do four chunky 3G-SDI cables instead of a much cheaper and easier-to-handle fiber cable (when the standards very much do exist). But once your signal is IP, then of course fiber is everywhere and readily available, so there seems to be no real blocker there.
I don't know but is there a maximum compression weight on fiber, because in some of these broadcast centers they've got cable trays of SDI that are so heavy and packed that removing a dead line is a fire hazard (because the friction of pulling the line could cause a fire).
They'd obviously need a lot less and the lines are a lot lighter but maybe folks figured if they could avoid repeating that scenario in their design, it might be a good idea :-P
You can build fiber basically arbitrarily solid. A normal patch cable won't be that solid, but the more rugged trunk cables is something like (just pulling out of a data sheet for something I used a while back):
To be clear, this is not specially rugged cable by any means. This is just a normal G12 cable for general use. You can get stuff that's much more solid. It's certainly much lighter than the equivalent SDI copper cable.