Fiber Count Chart Builder

Assigning cable counts to a high-fiber cable by hand is the kind of work that eats an evening on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet that never quite adds up, and — if a number turns out wrong — hours or days finding the error in the field, sometimes after the splice is already made.

The builder takes a job sheet (printed or handwritten, you can snap a phone photo of it) and assigns every count to the right fiber in seconds. If the math is wrong, it's wrong before the splice, not after.

A fiber count is the customer-assigned identifier for a specific fiber within a cable. On a job sheet you'll see entries like XD, 1-11 (eleven dead fibers numbered 1 through 11), F6Z, 24 (a single fiber labeled F6Z, 24 on cable position 12), or LR, 1-48 (forty-eight active fibers numbered LR, 1 through LR, 48).

Depending on the carrier or contractor, the same concept goes by several names: cable counts, cable stack, complements, count list, or fiber assignments. They all describe the name assignment of the individual fiber.

Three: TIA-598-D (North America and most global deployments), IEC 60304 (Asia and parts of Europe), and VDE 0888 (Germany and the wider DACH region). Pick from the Standard dropdown at the top. The color sequence, the order they're shown, and the legend all update to match.

Both define a 12-color sequence for identifying fibers and groups. TIA starts at Blue; IEC starts at Red. The two standards share most of the 12 colors but differ in the order. VDE 0888 also starts at Red but reshuffles positions 2-4 (Blue / Yellow / Green vs IEC's Green / Blue / Yellow). If you're not sure, TIA-598-D is the safe default for US work.

Three ways. (1) Click any fiber swatch on the chart, type a count like F037 or XD, 1, press Enter, and you'll be prompted for the ending count of that range. (2) Paste a block of count entries into the "Enter or paste cable counts" textarea and hit Apply — one entry per line in the format LABEL,N for a single fiber or LABEL,N-M for a range. (3) Tap "Scan with camera" on a phone to OCR a photo of a job sheet.

A header line. The builder reads CO<n>, CABLE<n>, or a bare number as the total fiber count and auto-selects the matching option in the Fiber count dropdown. Trailing annotations like CO144(E)=4110' are accepted and ignored. If the header is missing — or the number is unusual and doesn't match a typical cable size — the chart sizes itself to the highest count position in your paste instead.

Dead or unused fibers. Some carriers use XD, some use just D — the builder treats them the same. Both are absolute positions: XD, 109 and D, 109 always land on actual fiber 109, regardless of what was placed before them. Every other label (IF, OF, LR, F6Z, B37, etc.) is placed cumulatively from the next available position.

The cycle indicator. The TIA / IEC / VDE color sequences only have 12 colors, so once your cable has more than 12 groups the colors repeat. Each repeated cycle gets a different color filling the bottom half: cycle 1 (groups 13-24) shows Blue, cycle 2 (25-36) Orange, cycle 3 (37-48) Green, and so on. Cycle 0 (groups 1-12) has no marker yet, so the cell reads as a solid color.

Two: 11″ × 17″ (tabloid) and 24″ × 36″ (wall). Tabloid paginates at 432 fibers per page; wall paginates at 1728 fibers per page. Either size produces a multi-page reference for the larger cables (up to 6912 fibers). If you do not have a printer for either size, order a printed copy from the chart shop instead.

$2.50 per chart via Stripe Checkout, or a $20 10-pack (saves $5) for techs making a lot of these. Credits from the pack apply automatically at checkout when you're signed in — no code to remember. The instant the payment confirms you get a download in the browser, and an identical copy is emailed to the address on the order. Digital download — all sales final.

Yes, but only on your device. The chart state (standard, fiber count, fibers per group, and all the counts you've entered) is written to your browser's sessionStorage on every change, so a refresh or a trip to Stripe and back doesn't wipe your work. It clears automatically when you close the tab. Nothing is sent to our servers unless you order a PDF or use the camera scan.

Yes. The photo is downscaled in your browser and sent to Anthropic's Claude vision API for OCR, which returns text in the same format the textarea accepts. We don't store the image; Anthropic's data retention is governed by their commercial terms. If you'd rather keep photos local, use your phone's native scanner (iOS Live Text, Google Lens) and paste the result into the textarea.

No. Browser print and Ctrl/Cmd+S are disabled on the builder itself so the printed copy you get is the properly-laid-out PDF, not a screenshot of the screen. Order the PDF or grab a catalog chart from /charts.

Email info@johnstonetechs.com with what you did and what you expected, ideally with a screenshot. Cable-count edge cases are especially welcome — we'd rather hear about a parser miss than have it bite the next user.