Tag Archives: Corning

Is There a Fiber Crunch?

There have been a number of articles in the industry press predicting a major shortage of fiber in 2026. Fiber manufacturers have already been working at full capacity due to the large amounts of fiber networks being built. Telcos like AT&T, Frontier, Brightspeed, Windstream, Consolidated, and many others have been busy building fiber. The big cable companies like Comcast, Charter, and Cox have been building fiber. There are numerous fiber overbuilders like Lumos and Metronet, which were purchased by T-Mobile and numerous other companies funded by venture capital. By my math, there was also over $13 billion spent in 2025 to build fiber, funded by grants and subsidies like ARPA, Capital Project Funds, RDOF, ReConnect, EA-CAM, etc.

2026 should also be a busy year for fiber construction. The telcos, cable companies, and fiber overbuilders are all planning a lot of fiber construction. There is still a little over $10 billion in planned fiber construction funded by the same existing subsidy and grant programs, plus there will start to be orders for fiber from BEAD grants as the year goes by.

Fierce Network talked to the major fiber manufacturers like CommScope, Clearfield, Corning, and STL, and was told that the companies are seeing unprecedented demand to provide fiber for AI data centers. This demand comes from both inside new data centers and also for the networks that tie data centers together.

I think people will be surprised to hear the amount of fiber wiring needed inside an AI data center. The Fierce Network article quoted Rahul Puri, the CEO of the Optical Networking Business STL, as saying that an AI data center needs 36 times as much fiber wiring as a normal data center. Anybody who’s ever been in a traditional data center will be floored by that assertion since there are typically large amounts of fiber wiring either under the floors or overhead of racks in a traditional data center. A Fierce Network article in December said that the giant 1 million processor data center being built in Louisiana by Meta will require 8 million miles of individual strands of fiber. Most of these strands will be part of fiber bundles of hundreds to a thousand fibers. The data needed to connect processors is gigantic.

Corning and other vendors are working on new technologies that will provide the needed connectivity within a data center, such as co-packaged optics that place optics and electronics closer together. Other vendors like STL are investigating hollow-core fiber to increase density and decrease latency.

There is also a huge demand for middle-mile fiber to connect AI data centers. Research firm RVA LLC predicts that 92,000 new route miles of fiber will be needed to connect data centers over the next five years. These are also big fiber bundles. My firm worked on a data center proposal last year that didn’t come to fruition, where the data center builder wanted a 512-fiber backhaul network.

One of the biggest challenges for the vendors is that there are different kinds of fiber for different uses, like inside a data center, in middle-mile networks, in last-mile networks, for drops, and inside buildings. The challenge for vendors will be to match manufacturing output with demand.

Vendors and industry experts are predicting that some kinds of fiber could experience ordering backlogs as long as a year. Vendors are likely going to satisfy their largest customers first, so smaller projects might find themselves in a bind.

It will be ironic after all of the hurry up and wait for BEAD if grant projects are badly delayed due to a fiber supply chain problem. But all of the industry predictions are based upon demand staying firm. There  are a number of credible predictions that there will be an AI market contraction in the coming year since data center supply seems to have outstripped the ability to generate the revenues needed to make the industry viable.

The Fiber Broadband Association says it is not expecting big backlogs in the fiber needed to build last-mile networks. I guess none of us will know for sure until we start seeing smaller ISPs place orders for fiber later this year.

Manufacturing Returning to the U.S.

The other day I watched an online announcement by Nokia of a partnership with Sanmina in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin to rehab and expand an existing factory. The factory will create over two hundred new jobs and will manufacture fiber electronics like OLTs and ONTs that are used for fiber-to-the-premise. Vice President Kamala Harris was on hand for the announcement since the impetus to build a factory in the country was partially driven by Buy America provisions in the upcoming BEAD grants.

Nokia is not the only fiber-related manufacturer to expand production in the U.S. Corning announced the construction of a new fiber optic cable plant near Hickory, North Carolina. CommScope is building a new factory in Catawba, North Carolina.  Prysmian announced the conversion of a factory in Jackson, Tennessee from building copper cables to fiber cables.

A recent press release from the U.S. Department of the Treasury documents the big burst of investments in new factories. This is being funded, at least in part by infrastructure spending that came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS Act.

The following chart comes from that Treasury press release and shows how 2023 spending for manufacturing facilities has doubled the average spending for 2005 – 2022. Most of the new spending is on computers, electrical, and electronic factories. The Treasury press release notes that 18 new chipmaking factories were started in the country in 2021 and 2022. But since the announcement of the CHIPs Act there are over 50 new chipmaking facilities underway.

This can only be good news for the broadband industry. First, it increases the chance to buy American electronics as part of fulfilling grants. But the real benefit is over the longer run. This means that a lot of U.S. electronics manufacturing will be able to rely on U.S. factories manned by U.S. employees.

I’m sure many of you join me in being dismayed for decades as U.S. manufacturing jobs were shifted overseas. We’ve seen a steady erosion of good-paying factory jobs and a decrease in households in the middle class.

Many of these new and repurposed factories don’t require as many new workers as older factories due to automation. But every new U.S. manufacturing job created is a win for the economy. This is a needed shot in the arm for the economy. We can’t run an economy where everybody is doing service jobs – although it looked at one time like that is where we were headed.

The Anniversary of Fiber Optics

Fiber CableI recently saw an article that noted that this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of a scientific paper by Charles Kao in 1966 that kicked off the field of fiber optics communications. That paper eventually won him the Nobel prize for physics in 2009. He was assisted by George Hockman, a British engineer who was awarded the Rank prize for Opto-electronics in 1978.

We are so surrounded by fiber optic technology today that it’s easy to forget what a relatively new technology this is. We’ve gone from theoretical paper to the world covered with fiber optic lines in only fifty years.

As is usual with most modern inventions, Kao and Hockman were not the only ones looking for a way to use lasers for communications. Bell Labs had considered using fiberglass but abandoned the idea due to the huge attenuation they saw in glass – meaning that the laser light signal scattered quickly and wouldn’t travel very far. Bell Labs was instead looking at shooting lasers through hollow metal tubes using focused lenses.

The big breakthrough was when Kao and Hockman found a way to reduce the attenuation within a fiberglass cable to less than 20 decibels per kilometer. At that level of attenuation they could overcome irregularities and impurities in the fiber cable.

It took a decade for the idea to be put to practical use and Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc.) found ways to lower attenuation even more; they laid the first fiber optic cable in Torino, Italy in 1977.

We didn’t see any wide-spread use of fiber optics in the U.S. until the early 1980s. AT&T and a few other companies like the budding MCI began installing fiber as an alternative to copper for long-haul networks.

We’ve come a very long way since the first generation fiber installations. The glass was expensive to manufacture, and so the early fiber cables generally did not contain very many strands of glass. It was not unusual to see 6 and 8 strand fibers being installed.

Compared to today’s standards, the fiber produced in the 1980s into the early 1990s was dreadful stuff. Early fiber cables degraded over time, mostly due to microscopic cracks introduced into the cable during manufacturing and installation. These cracks grew over time and eventually caused the cables to become cloudy and unusable. Early splicing technologies were also a problem and each splice introduced a significant amount of interference into the fiber run. I doubt that there is much, if any, functional fiber remaining from those early days.

But Corning and other companies have continually improved the quality of fiber optic cable and today’s fiber is lightyears ahead of the early cables. Splicing technology has also improved and modern splices introduce very little interference into the transmission path. In fact, there is no good estimate today of how long a properly-installed fiber cable might last in the field. It’s possible that fiber installed today might still be functional 75 to 100 years from now. The major issues with the life of fiber today is no longer failure of the glass sheath, but rather the damage that is done to fibers over time due to fiber cuts and storm damage.

The speeds achieved in modern fiber optics are incredible. The newly commissioned undersea fiber that Google and others built between Japan and the west coast of the US can pass an incredible 60 Terabits per second of data. Improvements in laser technology have grown probably even faster than the improvements in fiber glass manufacturing. We’ve grown to where fiber optic cable is taken for granted as something that is reliable and relatively easy to install and use. We certainly would be having a very different discussion about broadband today had fiber optic cables not improved quickly over the last several decades.