WJI November 2018 Feature Sample

WIRE JOURNAL NOVEMBER 2018

®

INTERNATIONAL www.wirenet.org

Fiber Optics

OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE WIRE ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL

FEATURE

Driven by heady demand for bandwidth and a blizzard of headlines about the dawning of the age of 5G, fiber optics is well poised for the future. This feature starts with a brief look at optical fiber by CRU’s Richard Mack, a historical look back by FOA founder Jim Hayes, followed by a wide range of related news.

The optical fiber story

At IWCS 2018, CRU’s Richard Mack provided an industry update. Below are edited excerpts from his commentary on optical fiber.

The good news for the optical fiber industry is that the fiber shortage has ended. That relates to the capacity of preforms from which optical fiber is drawn. While it is a positive for preform capacity to exceed demand to allow some flexibility in the market, global preform consumption and demand for optical fiber were too tight in 2017.

During 2018, preform capacity rose enough to supply enough base material to manufacture approximately 700 million km of optical fiber, those gains made possible by considerable investment in preform capacity.

Who was investing? Usually, one speaks of individual countries, and everyone turns to China. It accounts for about 60% of all optical fiber cable. It is safe to say that China’s outlook will also be the world’s outlook, at least for the time being. Some 400 million homes in China are “passed” by optical fiber, and more than 300 million

are classified as fiber subscribers. The FTTH projects, along with the carriers’ 4G construction, allowed China to exceed projections for optical cable installations for several years, but that changed in 2018, when China Mobile actually fell short of the fiber amount indicated in its tender for H1 2018.

China, which is seeking to focus on more value-added products, in a single decade went from a tiny sliver of global production of optical fiber in 1997 to more than 300 million fiber km in 2017, a CAGR of 13.9%. A single company, China Mobile (CM), has some 900 million customers, half of China’s optical fiber consumption.

CM, which if considered a country would be the world leader, missed its first half estimates for 2018, yet it and three other local carriers have still achieved impressive numbers. Much optical fiber infrastructure has been

China’s near-term trend will determine the world forecast Amount of optical cable installed each year in million fibre-km 600 500 400

Major variables in near-term demand: 1. Deployments in China 2. Amount of fibre in 5G construction (esp. 5G in China, using SA NR)

300 200 100 0

CRU chart showing leaders in installed optical fiber.

Source: CRU

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Lat. Am. Africa M. East Oth. A-P India SE Asia E. Eur. W. Eur. N. Am. All Oth. Ch. Ch. Mobile

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CRU Analyst Richard Mack said that 5G could have a widespread effect on the global fiber optic market.

New fiber focus: in Norway, it’s not FTTH but FTTR (Fiber to the Road) Fiber continues to extends its reach, with Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) considered to be the “gold standard,” but fiber is also deployed elsewhere. In Norway, a project is testing whether fiber has potential as a traffic aid for potentially perilous driving areas. Below are edited excerpts from an article by Stig Øyvannfor in Norse Code.

In Norway, a pilot intelligent transport system project in the high north, where roads are covered with snow and ice in winter, is testing a novel way of using optical-fiber cables. Instead of carrying data, the fiber works as a listening device to map passing traffic.

The concept of the Public Road Administration’s (PRA) is that the light signal in the fiber is altered slightly by vibrations from passing vehicles, so using an embedded optical fiber cable in a road may enable it to serve as a traffic sensor, recording the speed, weight, and direction of the passing traffic. The hope is that it will be able to tell how much snow and ice is on a road.

The cable is microtrenched a couple of centimeters into the asphalt surface of the road. The signal in the fiber varies according to the speed, weight, and direction of passing traffic. The variations have to be separated from background noise so researchers

Norway’s snowy/icy roads may someday “warn” drivers of perilous conditions around the bend.

Knut Pettersen from the Public Road Administration, left, and Peter Thomas from research partner Christian Michelsen Research study preliminary results of signal processing from the listening fiber. can extract useful information. As this creates large amounts of data, the project is focusing on developing efficient algorithms to interpret the signals.

“The preliminary results prove that the fiber cables are collecting what we hoped for, both vehicle speed, where on the road surface the car is, and when traffic comes to a standstill,” PRA’s Karl Magne Nilsen said in a statement. The goal is that the data can be converted into electronic signage that alerts drivers to traffic problems, from icy conditions to accidents.

Ideally, the long-term goal is for such information to stream from the roads to the dashboards of cars driving on them.

The PRA also compared how the listening cables perform when roads are clear of ice and snow.

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FEATURE

laid, and one key question is how much future growth will be bolstered by the advent of 5G, which will require far more nodes, which could lead to more optical fiber cable, including hybrid cables that also carry power.

Fiber optic growth in still in good shape in North America.

One of the richest markets, North America represents the second largest market for optical fiber. There has been expansion in the U.S., but also some backtracking, as Google has backed off some on its pledges of FTTH. Following the U.S. market is Western Europe, then Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia then India. Of note, while optical fiber has seen much more dynamic growth than metallic wire, the global market for the latter, estimated at $160 billion for 2018, is more than tenfold larger. The metallic cable market plunged more than 7% in 2009, and saw CAGR of 2.8% from 2012 through 2017, and is projected by CRU to come in at 3.5% for 2018.