Vendors ponder FTTP’s blown opportunity
The North American market for blown fiber-a technology that sends fiber to its destination by “blowing” it with powerful gusts of air through preinstalled tubes or ducts-has rarely stretched beyond LAN applications. Even when blown fiber left the building, it frequently did so only to extend an enterprise’s LAN to the next building on campus.
In Europe, however, blown fiber and cable vendors and British Telecom (whose patents some vendors licensed) have found that the concept works equally well for service-provider networks, particularly those in the last mile. After all, blown fiber campus networks can extend for thousands of feet, the same lengths common to fiber to the home (FTTH) installations. Companies such as Emtelle, Ericsson, and Pirelli have marketed the technology aggressively to service providers in Europe, and optical access-network developers in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy, among others, have opted to give blown fiber a try.
Now that fiber to the premises (FTTP) has become a viable market in North America, European vendors (with the notable exception of Ericsson) have come ashore here in hopes of duplicating their Continental success. Suppliers with a foothold in the North American LAN market also have begun to eye the local FTTP opportunity with varying degrees of intensity. However, their observations have led them to different conclusions about the North American space, except on one point their systems’ brethren have already learned: When it comes to defining the FTTP market, there are the large incumbents and then there is everyone else.
Whether indoors or outdoors, blown fiber and cable installations (the term “air blown fiber” is trademarked by Sumitomo Electric Lightwave) comprise similar elements. Plastic tubes provide conduits for the fiber, ducts provide conduits for the tubes (or for the cable, which usually don’t need tubes), junctions connect the ducts and provide branching points, and blowers jet separately both the tubes and the fiber or cable. Then, of course, there is the fiber or cable itself. Dura-Line (Knoxville, TN) is the leading supplier of polyethylene ducts for the U.S. OSP market via its ubiquitous trademarked Microducts. CBS Products (Rutland, UK), Condux International (Mankato, MN), and Sherman and Reilly (Chattanooga, TN) are the most visible manufacturers of blowing equipment, although Emtelle offers its own blower manufactured under subcontract. The other elements normally come from a single supplier. Depending on the application and preference, customers can obtain all these puzzle pieces together or separately.
How far fiber or cable can be blown depends on the fiber count, the width of the duct or tube, the air pressure the blower can generate, and how many turns the payload must take. Both Pirelli and Emtelle say they can empty a pan containing multiple kilometers of fiber-Jamey Swigert, marketing manager at Pirelli (Lexington, SC), says his company sells an 8-km pan-without splicing. However, such a length would require multiple blowing operations along the route. Swigert puts a reasonable maximum distance per blowing operation at 1 to 1.5 km. Payloads vary from one or two bare fibers to “microcables” containing 96 fibers or more; 12-72 fibers appear something of a de facto industry standard for such blown cables. Meanwhile, Dura-Line makes Microduct in sizes varying from 5 to 12 mm. But industry sources say duct sizes of 8/10 or 10/12 mm (inside diameter/outside diameter) find the most use in cabling applications, while fiber ducts can be as small as 3/5 mm.
Vendors selling to the premises market highlight the following as blown fiber’s main selling points: the speed with which blown fiber can be installed (particularly once the tubes are in place), the ability to install only the amount of fiber customers need exactly when they need it, a minimization of splice points, and the flexibility of being able to change fiber types easily as requirements evolve. The same benefits translate to the FTTP space, say suppliers.
“You tend to cut down on a lot of the splicing that’s involved, so you don’t necessarily have to have a high-paid splicer out in the field,” says Swigert. “So I think it cuts down on some of the labor expenses, and in some cases it can certainly speed deployment. And then of course you have issues like delaying the cost of the fiber until you’re ready to start receiving revenue from the customer.”
The flexibility blown technology offers can prove very appealing, particularly to installers who are on tight construction schedules. “Operators [can] have a limited amount of time in which the trenches for all the cabling are open. So if they only have a day, if they only have two days to put whatever they need to put into that trench, it’s a lot easier for them to put in some empty Microducts, which they can then fill later whenever they’re ready to,” Swigert explains.
Greg Williams, director of marketing at Draka Comteq USA (Claremont, NC), underscores the cost savings provided by the lack of splicing and the ability to install just the amount of fiber initially needed. Blown fiber installations can cost 50% less than conventional OSP methods during the first year of installation, he says. However, Williams and other vendor sources caution that such flexibility can come at a price if installers don’t accurately predict the rate at which fiber will be required. “The risk you’re taking is that I’m going to save half my up-front cost, but if I keep adding a cable in year three, five, and seven, by the time I get there, I’ve actually spent more than if I would have just put in a big outside plant cable [initially],” Williams says.
Not everyone agrees with this advice, however. “The biggest attraction to blown fiber was that if you got 30% take rate, you put 30% of the fiber in. But as take rates went on and increased, blown fiber became less attractive,” says John Lupton, president of Emtelle U.S. (Cambridge, MA). “That’s no longer the case with our new systems. The advantages are there irrespective of take rate. But, obviously, if you have low take rates, the advantages are even greater.”
With FTTP now among the hottest niches in North America, Pirelli (with its Scirocco offering) and Emtelle (and its Fibreflow line) have expanded from Europe to the U.S. over the last two years. “The U.S. market has lagged the rest of the world with regards to fiber to the home deployments, and the market wasn’t really there. It’s only really starting to come now,” says Lupton. “It’s going to be 2005, 2006 when it takes off. So we need to get a foothold and start showing the deployments and be ready.”
OFS BrightWave LLC (Norcross, GA) and Draka Comteq USA have joined the Europeans in a full assault on the U.S. FTTP market, particularly FTTH. OFS offers a product line called AccuBreeze FX, while Draka Comteq markets the JetNet products brought over when Draka and Alcatel merged cable operations last year.
All four companies have garnered customers in the U.S.; the four share a customer in Home Town Plus, a communications company wiring “over 100,000 homes” in Port St. Lucie, FL, according to Lupton. Home Town represents a typical customer for blown fiber and cable, in that it is an “alternative” carrier. “There are lower barriers to change, to blown fiber, for the new-build developer market as opposed to the larger incumbent operators, largely through size and ease of flexibility,” notes Lupton. “The developer market is full of smaller players who can make decisions more quickly.”
Greenfield deployments head the list of successful recent applications, according to Doug Blue, director of business development, North America, at OFS. The technology is particularly appealing for real estate developers who don’t have a lot of experience with installing communications networks and haven’t invested already in traditional cable-laying apparatus, he believes.
Another relatively common characteristic is the use of PON architectures. “We’re probably seeing it more in a passive optical network and particularly when you are looking at the location and distribution of the splitters,” Swigert explains. “People who are using a cascaded approach to splitters-where you may have initially a 1×4 split that breaks out further down into maybe a 1×8 or 1×16 split-in those type of architectures, using blown fiber in the last drop from the second split or your final split out to the home, typically the distances involved in those sorts of scenarios lend themselves well to blown fiber.”
“We see in the U.S. a greater propensity of PONs,” agrees Lupton. “A greater number of the other developments around the world are active-based solutions.” Lupton sees a trend toward putting banks of splitters in one location to ease maintenance and troubleshooting.
While these four companies have launched an all-out attack on the U.S. FTTP market, other firms have approached the space more cautiously, preferring to look at niche applications. For example, AFL Telecommunications (Spartanburg, SC) has targeted its three forms of MicroCore blown cable at urban applications. “Once you move into the metropolitan area and into the city streets, etc., and you have duct systems that are fully occupied, not only does the cost go up significantly to dig up a city street and go through placement of new duct there, but you also have a lot of issues that they’re running into with city officials on disrupting traffic, damage to the roads, etc.,” explains Kurt Dallas, director of sales and product management at AFL. According to Dallas and Donda Bishop, product manager for fiber-optic cables, the smaller duct sizes associated with blown cable make the technology perfect for expanding capacity in conduits that can’t hold more conventional fiber-optic cables, particularly since installers usually won’t need new permits.
Dallas and Bishop also see the small duct sizes as an advantage in specialized scenarios such as when installers have to drill through rock or other tough topology; the narrower ducts lessen the amount of drilling that needs to be done. They also view the market differently than some others, in that they see their main opportunity in overbuild applications.
“It needs to be something that is prohibiting you from doing that [dropping in standard cabling] to pay a little bit of a premium for the cabling. So it’s more retrofit than greenfield, unless you built that neighborhood on rock,” says Dallas. “By far the hands-down economically advantaged solution is in an overbuild situation where you are in a crowded area, there’s no open duct space, and you can go in with technology and avoid digging up city streets, placing new conduit, etc.”
The introduction of blown technology into FTTP applications has not proven universally smooth, however. One of the technology’s strengths-the plant’s small size and light weight-have meant that all blown fiber and many blown cables don’t meet the GR-20 environmental and tensile specifications experienced service providers demand.
“When we’ve talked to some of the telcos, they won’t entertain a product that would require them not to meet GR-20,” reports Trish Dawson, market development manager at NextGen Fiber Optics (Cincinnati). NextGen initially went to market with MicroBlo, blown cable for distribution and drop requirements originally developed in the U.K. by Brand-Rex. But the resistance to cabling that didn’t meet GR-20 led them to add MicroNext, a blown cable that meets GR-20 tensile requirements up to 300 lb. While heavier than conventional blown cabling like MicroBlo, cables such as MicroNext measure 6.5-7.5 mm in 72-fiber counts, compared to the 11 or 12 mm Dawson says conventional 72-count cables would present.
Several other manufacturers have developed cables that approach GR-20 requirements. For example, Blue says OFS has a cable that also provides 300-lb tensile strength and meets all the temperature and crush requirements of GR-20.
The fact there aren’t any standards for blown fiber and cable invites skepticism from some potential customers. While both the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the International Engineering Consortium (IEC) are working on such standards, which might make GR-20 concerns moot, sources differ on whether new standards will make much of a difference in the market segment that would provide the most validation for the technology: large incumbents, particularly the RBOCs, who have shown little inclination toward blown fiber and cable so far.
Emtelle’s Lupton, for one, doesn’t see standards as a major factor in the lack of interest so far from the likes of Verizon. “It’s things like skills roll out, the training of people to blow the fibers, those kinds of issues that have an influence on the decision-making processes of some of the big telcos,” he says. “They have done it this way [conventionally] for a number of years, why change-that’s a factor that we do see.”
For Sumitomo Electric Lightwave (Research Triangle Park, NC), the issue is more fundamental. While the company is the market leader in blown fiber for LAN applications in North America, it has chosen a more conventional product approach to the FTTP market. According to Gary Bishop, director of product management, and Alexandra Manning, marketing communications manager, the economic argument for blown fiber in FTTP networks doesn’t hold up.
“As far as running an air blown fiber solution and drop, we haven’t seen that much of an interest from our customer base,” Bishop says. “I don’t believe that the customers have seen an economical solution for an air blown tube system for simple fiber to the home.”
“They’ve not seen the economic advantage of it yet,” agrees Manning. “If they end up going to a blown cabling solution, they would primarily need to preinstall the infrastructure and then forecast demand. Whereas right now, in the evolution of the FTTP network and the PON network, they are fulfilling demand as it occurs. And that’s very easily and economically done just by doing the final drop to the premises with conventional drop cable.”
Bishop believes that the urban scenario AFL Telecommunications is pursuing has some merit. But unless requirements and technology change, he doesn’t see blown fiber’s strengths matching well with the greenfield requirements of major telcos. “Where we see that the air blown solutions are most advantageous is where the customer has a lot of moves, adds, and changes,” he explains. “In a situation of fiber to the premises, we wouldn’t see that same scenario playing out, in that the homes, once they’re established and once fiber is run to them, there’s not going to be a lot of moves, adds, and changes.”
Bishop also sees some merit in using blown fiber to cable apartment complexes and other multiple dwelling units, and other vendors believe such applications represent their best-if not only-shot at winning a major telco customer.
“Everyone is motivated by having a robust cost-effective network,” concludes Blue of OFS on the subject. “I think you’re going to be running into a situation that even though you can get a very cost-effective robust network with blown fiber, the ways of doing business in the past are probably going to make it very difficult for the larger customers to switch over to this new technology. So I’m not holding my breath for that to occur.”
Even without the major telcos, however, several sources expressed optimism that blown fiber and cable will establish a strong niche in North American FTTP applications.
“I think in the next year, and probably in the next three to five years, in terms of overall fiber sales in North America, you’d probably have to classify it as niche looking at it as a percentage of fiber sold,” Pirelli’s Swigert says. “However, I think it’s going to continue to grow.”
Blue also is modestly optimistic. “I think it is going to become more popular, but if we actually get to the point of labeling it ‘mainstream,’ that remains to be seen,” he says.
Building on Emtelle’s experience in Europe, however, Lupton is much more bullish. “I would disagree that this is a niche technology. It’s a niche technology in the U.S., but it’s not a niche technology elsewhere in the world,” he says. “There is a good deal of business to come out of the municipalities as they move forward. There is a good deal of business to be gained as the developer market begins to realize [the technology’s value]; it will move very quickly from being a nice option to being a must-have when it comes to selling your home. That in itself will lead to greater growth.”