Kind of but not as much as you might hope. Most of the time when telcos add more capacity to a fiber route they are either pulling more fiber through existing conduit or laying new ones along the same path. Being able to shoot farther is great if you’re building an entirely new route and can plan out your regen locations accordingly but not as helpful if you’re using the same huts on the side of road that were designed for shorter distances. They already have land and/or lease agreements, power, access, and all the other required infrastructure in place using shorter distance calculations. It would be expensive, and probably impossible in many cases, to set up new regen points along their existing routes.
Then there’s the added expense of testing, certifying, stocking, and training people how to use all this new gear, which probably has longer lead times to acquire. Add all that up and a 40% reach boost isn’t quite as enticing. That’s not to say it won’t be done in some cases. I believe some subsea cables use hollow core fiber and added reach in a situation like that is awesome. I just think most of them would rather invest in improving reach on the glass they already have in the ground than going with something like this.
Does not needing as many boosters make the cable cheaper to maintain to justify using it for all future expansion?
Kind of but not as much as you might hope. Most of the time when telcos add more capacity to a fiber route they are either pulling more fiber through existing conduit or laying new ones along the same path. Being able to shoot farther is great if you’re building an entirely new route and can plan out your regen locations accordingly but not as helpful if you’re using the same huts on the side of road that were designed for shorter distances. They already have land and/or lease agreements, power, access, and all the other required infrastructure in place using shorter distance calculations. It would be expensive, and probably impossible in many cases, to set up new regen points along their existing routes.
Then there’s the added expense of testing, certifying, stocking, and training people how to use all this new gear, which probably has longer lead times to acquire. Add all that up and a 40% reach boost isn’t quite as enticing. That’s not to say it won’t be done in some cases. I believe some subsea cables use hollow core fiber and added reach in a situation like that is awesome. I just think most of them would rather invest in improving reach on the glass they already have in the ground than going with something like this.
Its probably really useful in places where theres no fiber for 100s of km, like Tibet, Xinjiang, and America.
Hahaha.
“Remote regions of the world that don’t have fibre. Like most of America.”