OS2 LC to LC Outdoor Armored Fiber Optic Cable 4 Core, 4 Strands Single Mode Fiber, Direct Burial, Industrial TPU, 9/125um, OD-5mm, 50m/164ft

These work great, the ends are a little fragile but that’s expected with fiber connectors. Will be buying more

This item seems to be well built. I have used 2 of these so far - although only indoors. I have not tried them outdoors. They took normal bending and pulling to get them into place, with no failures. They have now been working for just over a month with no complaints.

I am adding fiber optic cabling between buildings at a farm and needed an easy solution to running armored fiber optic cabling at the site. I don't have any fiber optic cable termination tools, so purchasing pre-terminated cables that are long enough and are rated for direct burial made this project much easier overall. Fiber optic cable is very high quality and worked as expected. Using this and hardware purchased from Amazon, I was able to upgrade the network backbone to fiber optic cabling and resolved the video streaming 'stutters' that was prevalent on the old network. Very happy with the results of this project and these cables.

This replaces a gigabit ethernet cable I used to bury and replace from my house to my workshop, where the starlink is located. Lightning kept blowin up the cable and the two switches on either end. If it were just the switches I'd add lightning protection, but the cable itself is being damaged and doesn't even connect at 10mbps (two pair) after each significant storm. I switched to wireless with Deco outdoor units and that worked well enough - 50-80mbps, 40-60mS latency, but once I saw that 10g sfp+ 5 port 2.5g ethernet switches were becoming available under $50 each, I decided to try an optical cable. I may never use all three fibers, but I don't want to have to bury this more than once, and I don't want the additional cost of a pipe to pull cables later (I'm sure this won't come back t bite me...!) - that would push the cost above what I'm willing to pay for a solution at this time. Connecting one of the fibers with a 10g bidi sfp+ on each each end and holy smokes - I'm regularly getting 180-200mbps via wifi at the house, with latency around 28-35mS. To be fair I turned the Deco mesh network into an access point and switched to a ubiquiti er-x router at the same time, which has certainly had some impact compared to the NAT built into Deco, but the speed and latency improvements of this cable have easily been worth the trouble and cost. Now for the issues - this cable is provided spool-less, and uncoiling it by hand was a nightmare. I spent 2+ hours just laying it out across the yard. Save yourself some time and buy a reusable spool, or put the cable around a large pipe and glue on sides or make a spool of some sort. Looking back I should have chosen the cable on the spool for this 100M cable. Maybe it's not a big problem for shorter runs, but definitely keep it in mind as you select your cable. It also didn't come with a pulling eye pre-attached. I only needed to get it through a few small holes and short pipes so didn't need anything with significant strength, but you'll want to use a mesh fiber pulling eye if you need to pull it through anything narrow or long. Make sure it attaches securely to the armored portion of the cable beyond the split on each end. You'll need 1" pipe and holes for this. You might be able to get away with 3/4' but it's going to be a tight fit with the LC connectors in the way. They aren't staggered, and there's not quite enough length to stagger them without bunching up the cable too much. All that said, the significant speed increase and reduced latency was easily worth it. the cable worked perfectly the first time with no cleaning or needing to measure optical output or fiddle with transceiver parameters.

Pros - Soft and flexible snake is easy to work with Cons - Wish it came with a protective cover that holds all the ends together when running the cable to prevent damage This is a great fiber snake that is easy to work with and feels well built. Because I intend on using this snake for field recordings and broadcasts, it might get more abuse than an permanently installed run, so I wish it came with some kind of protective covering for the ends if it gets dragged on the ground and so that it doesn’t get snagged and break the delicate clips on the LC connectors. It does come with a clear plastic bag wrapped around the ends, so I could probably make my own protective cover and tape it around. But it would have been nice to have something built in that can quickly cover them up to prevent damage when coiling the fiber cable.