It may not look like much, but the amount of information that can be transmitted through a
strand of fiber the size of a human hair is astounding.
Fundamentally, in like one fiber pair, half of the humans on earth could be talking to the other half
simultaneously. That's how much capacity is there.
And so, it's so much more capable than all the other alternatives that it's hard to even compare.
Fiber-based networks make up the majority of the internet's backbone.
Fiber-optic subsea cables spanning thousands of miles, connect continents together, exchanging
data at nearly the speed of light.
Meanwhile, the massive data centers that host all of our cloud-based applications also rely on fiber
connections. Increasingly, fiber connections are making their way directly into people's homes,
providing them with fast, reliable internet.
Fiber is future-proof, yes.
And it's probably the best broadband technology in most cases.
To understand the technology behind fiber-optic internet and how the market for fiber products is
changing, CNBC visited Corning's optical fiber and cable manufacturing facilities in North
Carolina. Most famous as the maker of Gorilla Glass for iPhones, Corning is also the world's
largest producer of optical fiber by manufacturing capacity and market share, as well
as the largest manufacturer of fiber cable in North America.
We have fibers that were installed at the very beginning of our industry, almost 50 years ago,
they are still running today.
Usually, the lifetime of a system is not the fiber itself, it's the electronics at the end.
So the lasers that are transmitting the light or the amplifiers, those are the ones that will fail
well before the glass will fail.
From the time that we've invented fiber until now, there's basically been about 6 billion kilometers
of fiber manufactured and installed around the world, roughly.
To put that in perspective, that is enough fiber to go back and forth to the sun 20 times.
But only 43% of U.S.
households have access to a fiber internet connection.
In some instances, particularly in rural areas and very challenging geographies, it can be
prohibitively expensive to deploy fiber and it can be very expensive for households to pay for
it.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that passed in November 2021 promises to bridge this digital
divide, With $65 billion dedicated to expanding access to broadband internet to all Americans.
Such government support, along with a number of other factors, have caused a spike in demand for
fiber products.
Fiber-optic internet is a type of broadband internet, which the Federal Communications
Commission defines as any internet service, which delivers download speeds of at least 25 megabits
per second and upload speeds of at least 3 megabits per second.
Though, after seeing the importance that internet connectivity has played during the pandemic, some
argue that this definition needs to be changed.
If you've ever shopped around for an internet service, you may have come across several
different broadband connections.
DSL or Digital Subscriber Line, delivers internet over traditional copper telephone lines.
Cable services use the same coaxial cable for internet that customers use to get TV.
In more remote areas where DSL or cable are not available, customers may be able to get wireless
or satellite internet.
But by far the best internet connection available today is fiber.
Unlike DSL and cable, where data is transmitted through copper wires in the form of electrical
signals, in fiber, data is usually transmitted through glass, though plastic can also be used, in
the form of light pulses.
Copper is a metal and that can degrade with time.
That doesn't happen with a material like glass.
Also, optical fiber is extremely strong material because it's so thin, it's very flexible.
You can make a knot with it and it's not going to break.
It doesn't suffer any interference for electromagnetic radiation or moisture or water.
So it's a more robust material, it's more reliable and the biggest advantage has much more
capacity, much more bandwidth.
You can put much, much more data into an optical fiber than you could put in a copper cable.
Fiber-to-the-home can give consumers much higher speeds, up to one gigabit two gigabits currently,
and the sky's the limit.
It's limited by software more than hardware.
Transmitting data in the form of light is not a new idea, but early versions of optical fibers had
a problem. Impurities in the glass cause the strength of the signal to progressively get weaker
as it traveled down the length of the fiber, a phenomenon known as attenuation.
The British post office came to us with a challenge and they gave this challenge to a lot of
people. And it just happened to be a race that we won.
In 1970, Corning came up with an optical fiber made of glass so pure that it allowed data to be
sent over massive distances with minimal signal loss.
In 1983, New York and Washington, D.C.
became the first major cities in the world to be connected through a long-distance fiber-optic
link. The anatomy of a single optical fiber looks something like this.
A core made of ultra-pure glass is surrounded by a second layer of glass, which reflects the light
signal and traps it inside the core as it moves down the length of the fiber.
Both layers of glass are then encased in a protective coating.
Dozens to hundreds of these optical fibers are then packed together to make a single optical
cable.
We need a glass that is orders of magnitude more pure than a glass for a window.
So it's a totally synthetic process.
What we do, we mix a combination of different gases in a hot flame, and during that we create a
chemical reaction and we generate soot particles.
So very tiny little particles of soot glass or silica glass, those particles are deposited into a
rod.
From there, the resulting rod, known as a preform, is placed into a consolidation furnace where the
white, porous material is transformed into an extremely pure, transparent glass.
The newly formed glass is then heated and stretched into a hair thin strand, becoming the
core of the optical fiber.
Then steps one and two are basically repeated at a bigger scale to create the second layer of glass
that's used to trap the light signal.
Finally, a protective layer is added to insulate the glass before the optical fiber is wound into
large spools.
The finished optical fiber is either shipped out to customers or transferred to one of Corning's
other facilities, where it's bundled into a cable before it is installed.
The telecom boom of the late 1990 and early 2000 created demand for fiber products as providers
sought faster voice and data transmissions.
But this demand quickly dried up with the burst of the dotcom bubble.
When the internet bubble burst, which you could see, is that we had too much glass in the ground
relative to what the demand was.
And so then that led to a relatively bleak demand outlook.
But now demand for fiber optic connectivity is picking up again.
In Q2 2022, Corning disclosed that the optical communications business was its largest segment by
revenue, reaching sales of $1.3 billion, a 22% increase year-over-year.
Meanwhile, experts estimate that the global fiber optics market will reach $11.18 billion by 2030.
If you look back over time, we've actually been riding a curve here in fiber optics where we're
growing at a compound annual growth rate into double digits.
Corning says that the government push for fiber expansion will likely add between 10 to 20% of the
company's demand for fiber-optic products.
Demand is so high that it's even caused a global shortage of fiber-optic cable.
The biggest economic challenge to deploying fiber-optic cables right now is the continuing
supply chain disruptions as a result of the Covid pandemic.
And that affects everything on the line from manufacturing, to transport, to actually having
the resources to deploy systems.
And so we're seeing that projects that would have taken a matter of months may take a couple of
years now in order to fully deploy.
Corning is also feeling the crunch.
Can Corning currently keep up with demand for both optical fiber and fiber cable?
The answer on fiber is yes.
The answer on cable is not yet, but we're working on it.
So on the cable side, it's a regional business and with all the increased demand that we've seen,
the entire industry is constrained.
We saw that coming a couple of years ago.
And in fact, the factory you're sitting in right now is evidence that we're acting on that right
now. We have one phase of expansion underway and up and running.
And you're sitting here today seeing that.
Across the street, we have our next phase that was just announced back in September.
It'll be ramping up towards the end of this year and into the beginning of next year.
The company has also said it will open an optical fiber plant in Poland sometime this year to
service the European market.
Experts point to several factors feeding this demand.
The first is the pandemic, which made it clear that having reliable internet is a matter of
social equity providing access to education, health care and employment opportunities.
Typically, internet traffic grows about 25% per year, and during the pandemic, at least the first
year of the pandemic, we saw it double to 50% for that first year.
The expansion of 5G is also driving demand for optical products.
Many rural customers are turning to wireless technology in areas where fiber-to-the-home is not
available.
To achieve the quality of service demanded by 5G, there need to be up to ten times more antennas,
and every single one of those antennas has to be fed with fiber to achieve the bandwidth that's
required.
While telecom providers like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast have been the traditional customers of
fiber-optic products, big tech companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft are
increasingly buying a bigger share.
If you look at a hyperscale data center, which is basically what they do to run cloud-based
applications, the amount of fiber in just one campus of a hyperscale data center is more than
what it would take to do fiber-to-the-home through the whole Washington, DC metro area.
In recent years, tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have also heavily invested in
building their own subsea fiber-optic networks.
Subsea fiber-optic networks were traditionally built and owned by governments or a consortium of
companies, usually telecom providers like AT&T and BT.
These companies would then lease bandwidth to the likes of Google and Meta, but as the cost to rent
capacity on existing networks rose and the tech giants needed more and more bandwidth, some
decided it makes more sense to build their own.
Experts say that the majority of long-haul network connections are already fiber based.
In the case of subsea fiber cables, which connect continents together, installing a single cable can
cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to complete.
The process requires surveying vessels and specialized cable-laying ships, which gently lay
the cable along the sea floor.
As the cable approaches the shore, it's buried in the sea floor so it doesn't get in the way of
human activities.
Most long-haul terrestrial fiber cables, which connect major cities, are also buried underground.
But some connections, especially last mile connections leading directly into people's homes,
can also be installed aerially on poles, which is a cheaper option.
Internet service providers are usually in charge of installing their own fiber, and it's these
last-mile connections that have been especially slow to deploy, particularly in more rural areas
where the addressable market is small and doesn't justify the high cost of installation for the
provider.
When you get to these more rural applications, at least in the past, there hasn't been a business
case for private industry to invest in those kinds of areas.
And so I think government stepping in and having a hand and providing the right incentives in the
right way for companies like Corning and all of our carrier partners and other alternative carrier
partners to build the network that everyone really needs.
Experts say the biggest cost in deploying fiber is not the materials, but rather the installation
itself.
Anywhere between 60 and 80% of the cost of a network is just installing it.
You need labor.
You need to have the ability to go in and shut down roads for a period of time.
The sector also faces labor shortages.
It's projected by 2025 to do all the broadband deployments that we'd like to.
There's a need for 1.5 million installers.
Currently, the industry has 650,000, so that's a gap of 850,000.
To help bridge this gap, Corning, along with AT&T, are launching a program to train technicians and
network specialists.
Meanwhile, others like Meta are working on automated ways to deploy fiber.
Despite recent investment in fiber deployment, the U.S.
Still trails other areas of the world in fiber internet adoption.
Fiber adoption in North America and particularly in the United States, we found, was much lower
than in markets such as Europe and Asia Pacific when taking on a regional basis.
Overall, Europe and Asia, we have seen over 50% of households have adopted fiber.
By comparison, only about 21% of U.S households subscribe to fiber internet.
The majority subscribed to cable internet, which is often bundled with phone and TV packages.
Early adoption of cable TV and cable broadband technologies in the United States have played a
key role in the lagging of fiber deployments and the adoption of fiber services by consumers.
Since early days, consumers in the United States have associated TV with cable and cable companies
were very quick in rolling out their networks nationwide, particularly almost everywhere in
major cities. And they were also one of the first to offer advanced high-speed broadband solutions.
Jurkevic says that part of the delay in U.S.
fiber deployment stems from the strong political influence of incumbent internet providers.
About 18 states have some kind of hurdles for municipalities to lay their own broadband networks
and offer services.
Some of these restrictions can include pricing, so municipal networks cannot set service prices
that are lower than incumbents' prices.
So there is no incentives for consumers to be switching in that scenario.
Or, for example, in some areas, if there is even a single internet provider, a municipality cannot
offer their own services.
And that single provider could be a very, very slow and very costly satellite service.
In contrast, Europe has leveraged municipal broadband, and there are many examples,
particularly across the Nordic countries Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway.
Another factor contributing to the low fiber broadband adoption rates in the U.S.
may be the sheer size and geography of the country.
It's much easier to connect Singapore, which is a size of medium city in the United States and most
people live in an apartment buildings compared to connecting an entirety of Texas.
Despite the challenges, experts believe that fiber deployment is ultimately worth it when compared to
some of the other solutions available because the service is so much better.
If you look at one example of recent development with the StarLink system, it costs about $30
Billion to develop, and peak capacity on this entire system is roughly ten terabits per second.
That's covering the globe.
If you look at just one fiber-optic cable, for example the Dunant cable, which was recently
launched transatlantic, that cable has 250 terabits per second of capacity, multiples higher
than the entire Starlink system.
And when you look at the cost, the entire cost estimate for all subsea cables to be deployed
within the next two years is a fraction of the cost of the Starlink system.
So satellite is terrific for reaching these pockets that are unserved.
But the impetus to get fiber to everyone has always been there because it is so much ultimately
more cost effective and so much better in terms of throughput and delivering applications to end
users. There's no comparison.
I think more and more people are realizing that fiber networks are quite valuable.
Eventually, fiber networks are going to be needed everywhere.
And if you're looking at the long term, once you do install fiber, it has virtually endless
capacity. So it's a really valuable asset once you get your initial payback on investment.
For now, many Americans still don't have the option for fiber connections, but Corning thinks
that will change.
All the subsea networks are fiber.
All the long-distance networks are fiber.
All the metro ring networks are fiber.
And the last segment of the network to really replace is the access network from sort of a
central point out to everyone.
And so over time, we believe, say over the next ten or 20 years, the entire network will be fiber.