Cables Plus is getting ready to launch its newest line of MTP Standard and Secure products. These products include MTP ribbon and enterprise cable assemblies, standard and secure "keyed" couplers, and our already popular MTP cassettes.

Why MTP? With today's increasing network demands, network engineers are looking for a more cost-effective/space-saving solution for their data centers. With valuable real estate in racks taken up by large servers and switches, engineers need a smaller solution to patch their data. MTP cassettes within RAC series rack mount fiber patch panels is the solution. With 12 ports in a RAC-4X, you could fit 12 cassettes with 6 LC Quad couplers (24 fibers). That's a total of 288 fibers! The average data switch in a high-capacity application has about that many ports so by using up only 4 units of rack space, you're patching that entire switch. Another benefit to MTP is the less amount of space it takes up. A 12-fiber MTP ribbon cable is very very thin with a jacket size smaller than the average 3.0mm single fiber. If you're worried about damaging the fibers and have to do a lot of patching and moving of the cables, you can go with the Enterprise version which has a thicker, bundled jacket for all of the fibers.

Our standard and secure MTP cable assemblies are also 10 Gig 50 micron which is a dramatic increase in speed and bandwidth. This also serves to future-proof your installation by having the 10000Base-FX spec and also having the MTP connector which we predict is going to take the place of LC connections.

More news to come on this exciting development!