I thought I had read that some cables have systems at each end to detect and correct when there's a splice with swapped cores, however, I can't find a reference; you could imagine such a system would mitigate partial breaks by assigning working paths to priority customers. However, I see a lot more about automatically aligning multicore fibers for splicing, I suspect proper alignment may be more practical than fixing it at the ends.
Even if it's not automated, the number of cores in multicore fibers tends to be pretty low, and there's a standard for marking fibers [1], that's similar-ish to the standard for marking copper pairs [2].
Comments
I thought I had read that some cables have systems at each end to detect and correct when there's a splice with swapped cores, however, I can't find a reference; you could imagine such a system would mitigate partial breaks by assigning working paths to priority customers. However, I see a lot more about automatically aligning multicore fibers for splicing, I suspect proper alignment may be more practical than fixing it at the ends.
Even if it's not automated, the number of cores in multicore fibers tends to be pretty low, and there's a standard for marking fibers [1], that's similar-ish to the standard for marking copper pairs [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA-598-C
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25-pair_color_code