Rapid Upgrade And Overbuilding

The development of high-bandwidth applications is enabling fiber service providers to deploy quickly. Today's demand planning, while predicting future demand, needs to increase the number of optical fibers and establish a path that can easily accommodate excess construction and upgrades.

Moreover, it is not just the number of fibers that need to be upgraded. Today's technology is changing so fast that a new generation of hardware is introduced every few months. As the low latency requirements of new services such as 5G increase, next-generation routing and switching equipment must also keep up with the latest service level requirements.

In today's (super) connected era, the status quo is a constantly changing goal. Instead, it is best to plan the network for situations that require more throughput than originally anticipated. This means overbuilding the network for these services now, or designing the network and preparing the path so that it will be easier to deploy more fibers in the future.

The Number of Fibers Is Important

Fifteen years ago, the main force of the network was 96 optical fibers. Today's network standards require the use of fibers with 288 to 864 cores and more. For example, for those data centers with increased bandwidth requirements, 3456-core optical fibers may be used.

When considering the overall cost of construction, the optical fiber itself only accounts for a small proportion of the entire construction, so it makes business sense to overbuild to ensure future capacity. Digging a road or sidewalk to install more fiber is much more expensive and destructive than running more fiber in the initial construction.

The key is to strike the right balance. One situation is over construction. For example, if 48 fibers are needed to serve a region today, installing 1,728 fibers may be an overkill. Many optical fiber service providers have adopted formulaic methods in new construction without committing to large-scale over-construction.

Changes In Fiber

In the past few years, changes in optical fiber have made it more effective and can continue to meet future needs. Although the purity of the glass has always been static and G652 is still the standard, the physical size of the fiber has changed due to new technologies and processes that have reduced its internal quality. Newer fibers eliminate the strength components within the fiber, and use "glue" to hold the fiber strands together, reducing the size of the fiber bundle by about half. For example, a tube that used to be one inch wide is now half an inch and contains the same or more fibers.

This is a huge improvement in the industry. It has become mainstream to see 432 or 864 fibers using this denser composition. This is particularly the case in areas where the Ministry of Transportation has a key border crossing or a leased third-party system that requires capacity but space is limited.

Planning For Next-Generation Services

Designing a scalable network to meet quality of service (QoS) standards requires more than just more fibers. Using clear indicators surrounding the capacity requirements under specific circumstances (such as horizontal to single tenant, ring or backbone network) fiber service providers can manage the frequency of upgrades and maintenance, reducing interference to end customers. The result is consistent and reliable uptime every month.

For fiber service providers, planning for the next 20 years means establishing sufficient front-end capacity and creating strategically designed, constructed, and licensed routes to support their longevity and easy upgrade capabilities. This creates continuous QoS, helping customers succeed and scale faster. Eventually, if a service provider builds its network correctly, it will gradually disappear in the background. After all, an always-on network means that work is done well.