Congress has approved trillions of dollars in new spending through the Control Inflation Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. In his “Breaking Ground” series, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal visits communities across the country to see how this infusion of federal funds is changing the economy in complex, unseen and even contradictory ways.
In the inaugural episode of our Broadband special, Ryssdal explores how the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act’s $42 billion investment in broadband will impact fiber optic cable manufacturing in the United States.
BEAD Program
One of the goals of the bipartisan infrastructure legislation is to connect every home in the United States to high-speed internet. The legislation creates the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, allocating $42 billion to states and several territories. From there, state governments will be responsible for distributing grants to internet service providers to ensure everyone can connect to the internet.
The BEAD program is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), part of the Commerce Department. NTIA urges states to prioritize fiber optic internet. “We believe fiber optic is a technology that will scale with residential internet needs over time,” an agency spokesman said.
The Build America by America Act, part of bipartisan infrastructure legislation, requires that BEAD funds be used only for American-made fiber optics and fiber optic cable.
This means America’s textile supply chain will need to scale up to meet the increased demand driven by federal investment.
Inside the supply chain
To understand how fiber-optic cables are made, Ryssdal toured Prysmian’s manufacturing facility in Claremont, North Carolina, and spoke with the company’s Italy-based leaders.
“We have 29 factories in North America,” said Patrick Jacobi, senior vice president of North American digital solutions, “and we’re one of only three manufacturers pulling fiber optics and making cable in the U.S.”
The Commerce Department found that there are only three companies that manufacture fiber optics in the United States that meet the federal government’s Build America Buy America standards. Fiber optics are strands of glass that are “stretched,” or melted, to lengths as thin as a human hair. Light travels through the glass to carry data and provide an internet connection. The fiber optics are then wound into cables that can be safely installed on-site.
The 1.2 million square foot manufacturing facility in Claremont is the only Prysmian plant in the world that produces both fiber optics and fiber optic cable, and as BEAD money starts to trickle through the economy, this facility and others like it will need to produce more fiber and cable.
“We’ve put ourselves in a position to serve the needs of our customers who receive BEAD funding,” Jacobi said. “We’re not the direct recipient of BEAD funding; it’s administered by the state. The money goes to internet service providers, cooperatives and municipalities. These are the people who collect the money, and then we supply them with the cable.”
How are fibers made?
About 280 people work at the textile factory, operating in two 12-hour shifts from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. With BEAD funding coming in, Prysmian plans to hire more workers as demand for textiles increases.
Fiber optics starts as a thin tube made of pure glass. At the center of the tube is the core, a piece of glass through which light passes.
Sand, chemicals and more glass are added to the tube, Jacobi said, until it grows to about the diameter of a soda bottle. At this stage, the glass is called a preform. The preform is then transported to the top of the fiber factory, six stories up, where it’s melted in a “pultrusion process” and drawn down to a fiber-size diameter.
“Drawing is taking out the preform and [a diameter of] “It’s 125 microns,” says Mark Smith, manager of fiber selection and customer care at the Prysmian mill. The final size is roughly the diameter of a human hair.
Smith said the sawing process continues from the sixth floor “all the way down to the first floor. They thin it, they coat it, and then it’s wound onto a reel as the finished product.”
Fiber reels look like large spools of thread, and the largest fiber reels at the Claremont facility hold up to 500 kilometers (more than 300 miles) of fiber.
“If you pull it, the fiber is stronger than steel,” Smith said, “but if you tie it in a knot, it breaks, just like glass.”
The final step before the fiber leaves this facility is a series of quality tests, which include measuring how well data travels through each strand of fiber to ensure that the fiber is strong enough to be installed in your home.
“Their job is to technically cut the fiber,” Smith said. “We’d rather have the fiber cut here than have the fiber cut in the field.”
Cable Manufacturing
Once the fiber passes the quality tests, it is sent to a second factory on the same premises – the cabling factory.
“We take the fiber optics you see and make them viable in the real world,” said Cable Plant Manager Tracy Overcash. “We add multiple layers of plastic tubing and cable around the fiber optics, preparing it to withstand extreme temperatures, tension, bending and other elements.”
In the cable factory, where 130 people work in shifts around the clock, everything they do is aimed at making the optical fiber thicker. The first step is called buffering.
“The buffer lines have very fine fibres that are essentially glass and we need to make sure that the glass that is brought onto site is protected from the elements, transport and handling,” says operations manager Stuart Purves. “It’s covered in a protective gel so that it actually travels within a protective plastic tube.”
These tubes typically contain 12 fibers. Multiple buffer tubes containing multiple fiber strands are wrapped around each other and layered. The final step in the process is called jacketing, which places a final protective layer around the tube to create the cable you see outside. This is what Internet Service Providers purchase to install fiber Internet.
“We start to get nervous around the jacket because that’s where the most value is on the reel,” Purves said. Depending on their final destination, some cables are wrapped in flame-retardant cable.
The finished cables are wound onto giant wooden spools, the largest of which are 8 feet tall and weigh up to 7,000 pounds of cable. Prices for these cables range from a few cents to tens of dollars per foot, depending on their size and the number of fibers inside.
“Fiber optics is future-proof,” Overcash said. “The cables we’ve shown you today are built to last outdoors for decades.”
Overcash, a North Carolina native, has worked for the company since 1996.
“In the last 60 days, someone has walked down the street and put fiber optic cable in my front yard,” he said, “and the irony is, I’m looking forward to finding out what cable it is. I’m going to check the brand name. It’s just so exciting to see fiber optics finally coming to my house now, and this late in my career.”
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