* More information about blown fiber
Last time, I talked about Sumitomo Electric Lightwave’s Air-Blown Fiber, which allows for flexible deployment options for users of fiber optics. Readers responded to the newsletter with a couple of key points.
One is that Sumitomo isn’t the only one with this technology. One reader highlighted the Blolite fiber system from General Cable and a joint venture of General Cable’s called NextGen Fiber Optics.
Sumitomo and General Cable’s predecessor licensed blown fiber technology from its inventor, British Telecom, in the early 1990s with the intent of marketing it in the U.S. BT had been using the system for years before that.
Despite the long history, though, Sumitomo Director of Product Management Gary Bishop says his company is seeing an uptick in sales that’s pretty recent. He attributes the success to the fact that more companies are doing it – it’s not a new, bleeding-edge technology anymore, customers can get blown fiber from different sources, and word-of-mouth is spreading news about the benefits.
Personally, I think it’s also reflective of a couple of realizations. One, the future (at least for the places where blown fiber has taken root) is in fiber optics, not copper. Two, the fiber you put in today may not be the fiber you want 10 or 20 years from now, so companies want the ability to easily remove some fiber runs to put in another kind of fiber years from now if they have to.
There are other customers of blown fiber that I didn’t mention last time, and that a reader pointed out to me: the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the ESPN campus in Connecticut, and the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario. Plus, Sumitomo tells me that its product is scheduled to be installed in the new World Trade Center in New York.
