European fiber deployment up 300% - Company Business and Marketing

Pan-European operators deployed 6 million km (3.73 million miles) of fiber in 1999, with similar volumes forecast for 2000--up 300% from 1997--according to a study by KMI Corp. of Newport, R.I. The study, Networks of Fiber-based Pan European Carriers: Market Developments and Forecasts, says the deployment is being fueled by regulatory changes, liberalization, and challenges to recently privatized PTTs (post telephone and telegraph) with modern, next-generation networks.

More than 20 pan European network operators have announced plans to build fiber-optic networks since 1998, while another group of carriers will lease fiber or capacity to provide services to end users. That brings the total of pan European carriers offering services over fiber close to 40.

To accommodate the demand for capacity, fiber-based carriers are using cables with high counts--usually more than 100 fibers--allowing some carriers to sell or lease fiber pairs to others to recoup construction costs. New carriers are also specifying NZDS (non-zero dispersion-shifted) fiber, a high-performance fiber optimized for multiple wavelength channels over long distances.

Other key findings are:

* Pan European operators will install 16.7 million km (10.4 million miles) of fiber by 2002;

* 90% of backbone fiber installed between 1998 and 2002 is or will be deployed by operators that were not providing long-haul services in Europe before 1998;

* NZDS will account for 75% of new fiber-based pan European network deployments;

* fiber counts in the long-haul network are typically 96-fiber; 144-fiber count cables are being used in MANs (metropolitan area network); and

* all fiber-based pan European network operators are installing DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) systems.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group