Lateral misalignment loss occurs when light from the core of the transmitting optical fiber enters the cladding of the receiving optical fiber, creating a loss. What is a mechanical splice? What is a fusion splice? Why splice? Fiber splicing is one way to join two optical fibers together so the light energy from one optical fiber can be transferred to another. The growth of ribbon fiber splicing is essential with increasing demands on network capacity, and it is becoming even more important in locations such as data centers, FTTH deployments, and in large-scale backbone networks, where an increase in capacity is in widespread use. This article will. Fiber splice loss measures how much signal drops when you join two fiber ends. Modern fiber optic networks usually keep splice loss. Ribbon cable can be spliced more rapidly by using mass fusion splicing technique. The total loss in decibels at the fusion splice is given by the following equation, where Pin is the total power incident on the fusion splice and Ptrans is the. To be able to judge whether a fiber optic cable plant is good, one does a insertion loss test with a light source and power meter and compares that to an estimate of what is a reasonable loss for that cable plant.