I Thought 432 Would Be Enough

I'm going to be honest here. When we announced a 432-count cable the size of a pencil, I felt like it would take a while for the US market to adapt. In particular, the 432 uses 200-micron fiber, which is not as familiar to the US market as it is in Europe.

If you stopped by our booth at the Fiber Connect show, we were showing how 200-micron fiber splicing differs from 250-micron. If you missed it, here's the skinny. The primary difference between 200 and 250-micron fiber is the coating thickness. The cladding (glass) diameter remains the same (125-microns). The cladding is the part that sits in a splicing machine's V-groove and gets fused. So, single-fiber fusion splicing is basically unchanged. In fact, we were splicing 200 to 250 in the demo just to make a point. It's so hard to tell them apart that we literally had to color-code the fibers to remember which was which.

Still, it seemed like it might take a while for splicers to get used to the idea of 200-micron fiber. So, we didn't want to rush things with 180-micron fiber, even though it was already being used by our European customers to get 576 fibers in pretty much the same space.

But when we started showing the cable around, the conversation often went like this:

Me (showing cable in photo above): "How many fibers do you think are in this cable?"

Customer: "Hmm...96?"

Me: "432--and it will fit a 10mm ID duct."

Customer: "Wow!....can you go any higher and still fit the 10mm duct?"

Almost before you could say 8.2 fibers per square millimeter, we were selling the 576-count with 180-micron fiber. Not wanting to stand in the way of progress, we rolled with it. You don't have to order off the secret menu any more.

If you'd like to see our microduct cables in person, we'll be at the ISE Expo in less than two weeks. I'll be in the booth on the 21st. Stop by and say "hi".