Comment by rezonant
10 days ago
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.