#9: Effective use of fiber cleaners and the myth of self-cleaning fiber connectors with Brian Teague

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Who is Brian Teague and Senko?

Brian Teague is an industry veteran with over 30 years of experience in fiber optics. He specializes in fiber connectors and fiber cleaners. His area of expertise is solving problems with cleaning and maintaining optical connections in many applications including:

Data Centers Central Office OSP cabinets
MDU interconnects Cellular cabinets HFOC in FTTx
Tactical harden connections for military and broadcast
SMPTE Broadcast Industrial and Mining optical interconnects
Military and civilian aviation

Besides holding an MBA, Brian has also the CFOT certification from FOA. You can hear more about this certification in Episode 2 with Jim Hayes. He is working as a Product Line Manager at Senko with a focus on fiber optic cleaners.

Senko Advanced Component is one of the largest global fiber optic connector suppliers globally and active with many industry standards bodies and consortiums. Senko’s latest innovative connector designs are the CS, SN and SN-MT connector systems are quickly being adopted to support QSFP-DD, OSFP and COBO applications for the next generation 400G and beyond optical networks. Senko surpassed the 1 million ends deployed mark for their very small form factor connector systems.

Why is Brian Teague Fiberminded?

Brian held various positions in his extensive career including two Product Manager positions at ADC and USConnec focusing on fiber cleaning tools. If there is one man who has seen everything in terms of connector contamination then it´s Brian. Due to this Brian is very adamant about proper fiber connector cleaning techniques. He is a guy who rather sees you having a good cleaning technique and only clean when necessary with quality products. Considering that he is Product Line Manager for fiber optic cleaning product, that says a lot.

Inspecting and cleaning the fiber connector endface with fiber cleaners only when required goes hand-in-hand with what Kevin Peres mentioned in Episode 4 around fiber testing and troubleshooting.

WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE AROUND EFFECTIVE use of Fiber cleaners and next-generation fiber connectors like CS or SN?

In this episode of the Become Fiberminded podcast, you will learn why fiber cleaners are important. These fiber cleaners allow you to effectively remove oil and dust contaminants that can negatively affect optical performance. However, under some circumstances, they can cause more harm than good if not properly used. Brian will go through each scenario and also go into more details on when the wet-to-dry fiber cleaning process should be used and what you should look out for.

Brian is also explaining what Senko drove to start developing these very small form factor connector systems (VSFF) like the CS and SN and what else they have in the pipeline and when we will finally see the self-cleaning connector. With these new connector systems, new challenges for the fiber technician are starting to pop up and Brian will address these as well.

Last but not least, Brian is also answering the question, of whether a newly bought fiber patchcord fresh out of the bag is clean or not.

Where can i learn more about Brian Teague and Senko?

Here is some more information about the topics mentioned in this episode.

Here are the social media links for Brian:

LinkedIn: Brian Teague aka MisterClean

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