We haven't been getting enough fiber here at TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but we're about to change that.
Nutritional jokes aside, this week, we welcome Todd Chapman, a veteran in fiber development, to the hot seat. Todd walks us through the ins and outs of Layer 0 of the physical infrastructure underlying data transmission. Some classic explaining of the internet.
In this episode, you'll get a walkthrough of the process that takes a fiber project from manufacturing to lit service—get ready to learn a thing or two about different types of fiber and their uses. We also get some good explanations of the dark fiber market and an overview of when enterprises might be interested in leasing dark fiber instead of lit service.
Here's a glimpse at what we discussed. Scroll to the bottom to listen to the whole discussion in its fiber-rich glory.
Greg Bryan: So fiber comes from first a manufacturing process of fiber OEMs, all the way to lit service that is powering what we think of as the backbone or the network or whatever.
So, can you maybe take us through the key steps along that journey?
Todd Chapman: Yeah, certainly. So, generally, you'll have an entity that, say, wants to build a network. And you want to architect that for whatever its purpose is.
So it may be a higher-performance, long-haul backbone network. Or it may be, say, a municipal network that's going to largely deliver internet services.
And so your inputs are going to vary. And so at a high level, the first thing is, OK, what's the purpose of the network? And then once you do that, you'll essentially map out a topology and determine what kind of fiber density you're looking for and what what type.
So if I were to use the example of, say, a high-performance long haul network, I'd want a high-performance network with very low loss fiber and probably high fiber counts, depending upon what my business model is.
So if I was looking at lease fiber, I'd want really as much fiber and conduits as possible. So I would then look at the physical fiber itself, right? And select a vendor, right? The preeminent vendor in fiber today is Corning.
So I assess: How much fiber do I need? If it's a low-density broadband or internet network, I might not need that much fiber. But if I'm engineering a high-performance long-haul network, then I may want thousands of fibers in my cable.
So I assess: How much fiber do I need? If it's a low-density broadband or internet network, I might not need that much fiber. But if I'm engineering a high-performance long-haul network, then I may want thousands of fibers in my cable.
Greg: So just to put a pin in that, you know in the submarine cable world, you lay a submarine cable, you're talking about usually, dozens, I think, of fiber pairs. Terrestrially, we're talking about literally thousands in a conduit.
Todd: That's correct. Yeah, because, as you know, with submarine networks, your real constraint is power. You have to power repeaters, you know, throughout the cable. So.
Greg: Over long spans with nothing else around, right? That's yeah.
Todd: Correct. Right. So the difference with the terrestrial network is you'll place huts, amplifier sites, every 80 to 100 kilometers on a cable. And then you also have the ability to hit PoPs for re-genning the signal if necessary, which is kind of less and less important these days with the high performance and advancements of technologies.
So you don't have the same constraints in terms of power that you do in a submarine network. That's what allows you the ability to just have a higher density of fibers in the cable itself.
Greg: I want to put a pin in something else that you said there, which is that the first step is thinking about, okay, what kind of fiber development am I doing here?
There's a big difference between backbone development, between, say, residential, where it's just a few strands, but also even at the materials level. You're saying that you might choose different kinds of fiber. Could you take us through that a little bit?
Todd: That's correct. So, primarily, we'll consider single-mode fiber for our discussion here. But if you go to any fiber vendor page, there are just dozens of different fiber products that they have. And you want to orient the selection of your type of fiber to your application.
So, if we go back to the submarine example, you'll typically want a very low-loss, ultra-low-loss type of fiber. It may have a different characteristic than a terrestrial network where maybe loss may not be as critical and you may want more density.
Listen to the full episode below.
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More Fiber-Rich Content:
- How Many Submarine Cables Are There, Anyway?
- Submarine Cable FAQs
- The Key Trends Shaping Long-Haul Capacity Demand
- The Speed of Light Never Changes—Except When it Does
- Will Fiber Pairs Become the New Coin of the Realm?
- Comparing the Fiber Strategies of the Big Three U.S. Mobile Operators
- Meet The Father of Fiber Optic Communication
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
