ANTONY SAVVAS FIBRE CABLE DEVELOPMENT
ARE WE REACHING THE LIMITS? FIBRE OPTIC CABLE DEVELOPMENT:
How far can fibre technology go, and what developments are in the pipeline? Antony Savvas considers how the industry is facing up to possible transport limitations, and whether it will have to come to rely on developments in photonics to meet demand for data throughput.
FIBRE STRANDS “The optical fibre itself is well developed, but how to cable that fibre for different environments and applications still has room for development,” says Massimo DiSabato, VP of strategy and market development for network cable and connectivity at fibre cable manufacturer CommScope. “For FTTH, for instance, there are two versions: the cable that carries signal through the country on a large scale (either underground or on a pole) and drop fibre cables, which connect to a home or business. While the former has multiple strands of fibre which are needed to deliver fibre to a community (hundreds, if not thousands of strands), the latter cable is typically a single cable or has a very low count. Given that the ease of handling and reconfiguration of FTTH, along with data centre applications, are different and always evolving, we will need to push the boundaries of fibre optic cable development to meet new challenges in the future.” Matt Rees, CTIO at Neos Networks, agrees that fibre’s time is certainly not up. “We’re far from the end of the road when it comes to where fibre optic technology can go. While there’s been a lot of noise around its mass roll- out, we’re still in the early stages of discovering the best ways to leverage this technology, much of which can be found in how we construct and deploy the cables. This is because every
customer has a different set of needs, so there’s no one-size-fits-all fibre solution. This demand for differentiation in the market will deliver innovation in the development of fibre optics, ensuring that we’re always finding new ways to improve the technology.” “We do not believe fibre cable is reaching development limits,” adds Raza Khan, senior market manager for Semtech’s signal integrity products group. “Fibre remains one of the most efficient mediums to send information from point A to B over short and long distances. Specifically for PON developments, FTTr (fibre to the room) benefits from the reduced bend radius of fibre. Small diameter bendable fibre that enables discreet installation in existing homes and offices expands the uses and reach for PON.” Also, reduced costs for rugged fibre cable and low overhead installation costs that enable FTTx to be used in emerging economies, delivers good returns by installing the fibre on poles rather than underground, Khan adds.
physics of light distribution mean data can travel more efficiently through a glass tube with nothing in its way, as opposed to being a solid piece of glass.” At the moment, he says, it is common practice to create buffer tubes with several strands of fibre optic cable within. Each tube has between 12 and 24 fibres within it, and this is useful when needing to bundle a lot of fibre strands together, such as counts of between 1,000 and over 2,000. But it’s inefficient for rural developments where there are very low fibre counts, due to less households being lit and lower broadband activity. “It is wasteful to construct only a 12-count fibre cable in the same way you would build a 1,000 count fibre cable, but new developments in the construction of cables themselves will eliminate the waste that would have been in empty buffer tubes, creating optimised cables for areas with lower fibre counts,” he says. These new cables are nearly half the size of traditional cable, meaning they are lighter in weight and use less material, so a lot more fibre cable can be transported in one go. Semtech’s Khan says hollow core can also have additional use cases, especially in 5.5G and 6G front-haul deployments over longer distances, where dispersion is present. “Semtech’s IC technology supports any kind of fibre being used with an optical pluggable to support these deployments,” he adds.
HOLLOW CORE Hollow core fibre was a definite
milestone in fibre development, but there are issues like losses due to bendability, light dispersion, and noise, for instance. CommScope’s DiSabato says, “While hollow core does have some limitations, it remains an important innovation in cable development. The
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| ISSUE 33 | Q2 2023
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