FTTH Con: Corning gets the bends

ORLANDO--Corning introduced a new highly flexible fiber at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference this week that can make sharp turns with minimal attenuation of the signal it carries, easing deployment for carriers.

Corning said its new fiber allows no more than 0.1 dB of loss for every 10-millimeter-diameter turn it takes, but in demonstrations on the show floor, it exhibited only half that loss.

In its booth at the show, a Corning employee wrapped both its old fiber and its new fiber around the shaft of a screwdriver 10 millimeters in diameter. Dual screens showed both the loss on the line in real time and a video signal being transmitted through the line.

The old fiber showed 10 dB to 11 dB of loss after just one turn around the screwdriver, immediately producing pixelation in the video signal that grew more severe with each ensuing turn. But the new fiber exhibited only about 0.05 dB of loss per turn, with slight degradation to the video visible only after at least three or so cumulative turns. Though other vendors have introduced similar bendable fiber in the past year, Corning claims to have the lowest loss per bend.

“In certain applications, Corning’s new fiber may be ‘game changing,’” Morgan Keegan analyst Simon Leopold said in a recent note. “The new bendable fiber may allow engineers to design smaller cabinets that could be cheaper, lighter and easier to install and less of an eye-sore when mounted to a telephone pole. Carriers may find it easier to deploy the bendable fiber, particularly in applications like apartment buildings and condos.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether the added stress and strain that carriers may put on the new fiber will give it a shorter life, he added.

Corning also demonstrated the ability of its new fiber, encased in plastic, to be stapled to surfaces without affecting signal quality.

Corning will make the new fiber, called ClearCurve, generally available some time in the first half of next year.