# An Antarctic climber’s worst-day approach to Amphenol cable

By MarketScale Newsroom · Published 2026-11-13 · Software & Technology on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/software-and-technology/an-antarctic-climber-designs-amphenol-s-broadband-cable-for-the-worst-day-1302516

> Amphenol Times Fiber’s Raskesh Thakare compares summit-day turnaround discipline to setting cable test pass/fail criteria, as generic PVC is rated to -15C.

## Key points

- Remee rates generic PVC cable jacket for -15C to 70C; Sea Wire puts plasticized PVC's floor at -40C and warns of embrittlement below it.
- ASTM D746 sets a material's brittleness temperature where half the specimens break, the cold side of the qualification an outside-plant jacket must pass.
- ICEA's current outside-plant fiber standard, S-87-640-2023, dates to May 2023; Corning's September 2017 cable spec cites the 2006 edition alongside Telcordia GR-20-CORE.

Raskesh Thakare reached high camp on Vinson Massif with his hands frozen and ice built up on his jacket and face mask. He had carried a 50-pound backpack for eight hours up from low camp to get there. Every piece of gear on his back had already been tried out on his living room floor, because once the plane takes off from the ice, the team is on its own.

Thakare is director of product engineering at Amphenol Times Fiber Communications, a subsidiary of Amphenol, and he told the story on Wavelengths, the Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast, in an episode hosted by Daniel Litwin. At work he picks the materials and designs for broadband cable, builds prototypes and tests them at different temperatures and in different scenarios until he is satisfied the product will last in the field. The glacier and the cable plant, he argues, run on the same rule: plan for the worst day, never the sunny one, and find the single point of failure first.

The climb is recent. Thakare says he summited Vinson, the highest point in Antarctica and one of the Seven Summits, last December, after first hearing about it on a Mount Rainier climb years earlier. For a broadband operator the more useful date is May 2023, when the Insulated Cable Engineers Association (ICEA) published S-87-640-2023, the current edition of its standard for optical fiber outside plant communications cable.

An operator putting fiber on poles in Minnesota or in the ground in Arizona buys against that standard and against the maker's own test record. What follows is how a mountaineer builds that record.

## A single point of failure is the risk, on the ice and in the cable

Thakare treats any single point of failure as the risk, on a climb and in a cable design. He said as much when Litwin asked what extreme climbing teaches about designing for worst case scenarios rather than the best sunny days.

Redundancy, in his telling, is a budget, and the budget is weight. On Vinson he packed multiple layers of gloves but refused to carry so many that the pack became its own hazard, and he always packs more food than the plan requires because being stuck on the mountain extra days is the one failure that cannot be improvised. The same weighing happens on a cable drawing.

A cable jacket is the outer plastic sheath that takes the sun, the ice and the abrasion so the fiber or conductor inside does not. Thakare's point is that the parts he judges critical get the extra margin and the rest are allowed to be simpler, which keeps the product from being gold-plated everywhere and reliable nowhere. For a buyer, the practical question is which elements of a given cable the maker has put in the critical column, and what margin each one carries.

## Generic PVC is rated to -15C, and Minnesota goes colder

Asked for a design choice that prevented a field failure, Thakare started with the climate range his cables see.

PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, is the workhorse jacket compound because it is cheap, flexible and flame retardant, as Remee, a cable manufacturer, lays out in a June 2025 comparison on its own site. Remee rates generic PVC for -15C to 70C and lists cold brittleness among its drawbacks. That number reframes Thakare's Minnesota example: the stock compound's rating stops well short of the cold he describes.

Sea Wire, a wire and cable supplier, goes further in a whitepaper on its own site about Arctic operations. It puts plasticized PVC at -40C to +70C, calls its cold flexibility moderate, rates its embrittlement risk high below -40C and recommends avoiding PVC below that line unless the compound is specially formulated. By that reading, a PVC jacket at the floor of Thakare's range is working at the edge of what the material family tolerates.

Thakare's answer, on the recording, is the qualification program rather than the material name. He says he chose well certified equipment with the right materials for the climb, and that a prototype is run at different temperatures and through different scenarios before it is judged sustainable for the long term rather than the short span of a product's life. The operator's follow-up is simple: ask for the compound's own cold-bend and heat-aging data rather than the generic PVC range.

The alternatives carry their own trade-offs. Remee rates polyethylene (PE), the common outdoor and direct-burial jacket, at -40C to 80C but calls it rigid compared with PVC and less flame resistant, and Sea Wire says low smoke zero halogen (LSZH) jackets, compounds that give off little smoke and no halogen gas when burned, must be specially formulated to avoid brittleness below -40C. Corning's own September 2017 generic specification for its outdoor ribbon cable calls for a polyethylene outer jacket loaded with carbon black for ultraviolet protection. The case for PVC in a given product, as Remee frames it, is cost, flexibility and flame retardancy.

## ASTM D746 finds the temperature where half the specimens break

The cold-side test behind a jacket rating has a precise definition. World of Test, a test equipment supplier, explains in an August 2025 article on its site that ASTM D746 sets a material's brittleness temperature as the point at which 50 percent of tested specimens fail under a specified impact. Specimens are chilled to a set temperature and struck, the fraction that fracture is recorded, and repeating across temperatures shows where a plastic that flexes at room temperature stops bending and starts breaking.

The same article names three drivers of brittle fracture: stress in multiple directions at once, low temperature and a rapid rate of loading, and notes that all three need not be present together. Most brittle service failures, by its account, come from the combination of multi-directional stress and cold. A jacket bent during a winter installation has two of the three.

The umbrella method for jacket compounds is ASTM D2633, according to product material from Universal Grip Co., a maker of test grips. That standard covers thermoplastic insulation and jackets for wire and cable and pulls in several procedures: tensile strength and elongation per ASTM D638 at 23C, cold bend per ASTM D746, in which samples are cooled, wrapped around a mandrel and checked visually for cracks, and thermal aging per ASTM D3015. Universal Grip's example for the cold chamber is -20C and for the oven is 136C for seven days, with a minimum of five specimens per condition.

Thermal aging is the Arizona side of the ledger. The specimens are pulled for tensile strength before and after the oven, and the result is reported as retention, the aged value divided by the original value, times 100. A report under D2633, per Universal Grip, must list the test temperatures, the cold bend result and temperature, and the retention figure, which is exactly the set of numbers a buyer can request.

Thakare does not name a test standard on the recording, so the ASTM numbers above are the ones the test equipment vendors tie to jacket qualification. A compound rated for the Minnesota cold he describes has to pass its cold bend in a chamber set colder than Universal Grip's example, and its heat-aging retention is what stands between the cable and an Arizona summer.

## The turnaround time is a decision made before the summit day

Mountaineers set a turnaround time, a clock time on summit day at which the party descends regardless of how close the top looks. Thakare keeps that rule strictly, and he describes it as discipline rather than preference.

Thakare turned around short of an Ecuador summit when the rising sun raised the avalanche risk. The party had started late, and the weather had not been good to begin with. On Pico de Orizaba in Mexico, which he calls not technically challenging, he has come down without the summit more than once, one time with altitude sickness, on the reasoning that the mountain would still be there.

The engineering translation is a test designed so that it can be failed. Thakare says assuming a beautiful sunny day on a mountain is a recipe for disaster and that design assumptions built on a basic scenario are never a good situation, so he runs a product through multiple situations rather than the nominal one. He does not describe a formal sign-off gate on the recording; what he describes is the habit of setting the harsh condition first and letting the prototype prove itself against it.

For an operator, the equivalent of the turnaround time is a pass or fail criterion fixed before the chamber door closes: the cold bend temperature, the aging retention percentage and the crack inspection standard. Sea Wire's whitepaper recommends that pairing, cold bend testing at the minimum expected temperature plus thermal cycling to confirm the jacket survives repeated contraction and expansion. A criterion agreed after the test is a summit reached after the turnaround time.

## ICEA and Telcordia set the outside-plant benchmark Corning also cites

Corning's own September 2017 outdoor cable specification names ANSI/ICEA S-87-640-2006, the 2006 edition of the ICEA standard, and Telcordia GR-20-CORE as its baseline. The document, which Corning publishes as a generic specification for gel-free single tube ribbonized optical fiber cable for outdoor use, also requires acceptance under the Rural Utilities Service rules in 7 CFR 1755.900 and sets a minimum nominal jacket thickness of 0.75 mm over the strength members. That is the published floor another large cable maker holds its outside-plant product to, written before the 2023 edition existed.

ICEA S-87-640-2023 covers cable that conveys voice, video and data between points external to buildings under conditions normally found in communications systems, according to the association's listing. GR-20-CORE, titled Generic Requirements for Optical Fiber and Optical Fiber Cable, documents the performance and reliability tests used to qualify optical fiber and cable and applies only to singlemode fiber, as Experior Laboratories, a testing lab, describes it on its own site. Experior adds that cable sheathing under that program is typically pulled to the tensile conditions in TIA/EIA-455-33 and 455-38.

Outside plant, in industry shorthand, is everything between buildings: aerial, buried and ducted cable exposed to weather. Thakare's in-house program sits underneath these documents, as the layer where a specific compound and construction is run through the temperatures the standards assume. On the question of recent change, the ICEA listing marks the August 2016 edition as historical and shows nothing newer than the 2023 edition.

## Carry extra food: what to ask before the cable goes to Minnesota

Thakare's most useful habit, by his own description, is the boring one. Before Antarctica he laid every piece of equipment out in his living room and tried layer combinations until he could change gloves with his eyes closed in high wind, and he took nothing beyond what he needed because he was the one carrying it. He calls the extra food the one exception: weight that is always worth carrying given the risk.

The cable version of that habit is the test record. Sea Wire's whitepaper tells buyers to follow the manufacturer's minimum bend radius at low temperature and to inspect insulation and jacket for micro-cracks after cold exposure, and Universal Grip's D2633 reporting list tells them what a complete record contains. An operator can ask a supplier for the cold bend result and its temperature, the heat-aging retention percentage, and which elements of the construction the maker treats as critical enough to carry a margin.

The signal Thakare himself points to is longer than any chamber test: whether the product sustains in the field over the long term rather than a short window. His measure of a good expedition is the same, the preparation and the process rather than the summit, which he calls the cherry on the cake.

## Sources

- [ASTM D2633 Wire Jacket Tensile Test](https://www.universalgripco.com/astm-d2633) (Universal Grip Co.)
- [How Brittleness Testing Helps Prevent Material Failure](https://www.worldoftest.com/articles/how-brittleness-testing-helps-prevent-material-failure/) (World of Test)
- [ICEA S-87-640-2023 Standard for Optical Fiber Outside Plant Communications Cable](https://store.accuristech.com/standards/icea-s-87-640-2023?product_id=2564757&srsltid=AYCX9vIZXxAcQoJx6xdhefv196fcjvgQhOXT6V6PqnvlZx4Ybk4cbKGj) (Insulated Cable Engineers Association (ICEA))
- [Corning Generic Specification for Gel-Free Single Tube Ribbonized Optical Fiber Cables](https://www.corning.com/catalog/coc/documents/generic-specifications/PGS066.pdf) (Corning)
- [GR-20-CORE Testing](https://experiorlabs.com/gr-20-core-testing/) (Experior Laboratories)

Tags: Amphenol Broadband Solutions, Amphenol Times Fiber, broadband cable, fiber optic cable, product engineering, materials testing

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