Marketplace - Breaking Ground: How are fiber-optic cables made?

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Bringing high-speed internet access to every U.S. household is one goal of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. To do that, we’re gonna need a lot more fiber-optic cables. Per the Build America Buy America Act, the $42 billion in federal funding designated for expanding high-speed internet access has to be spent on American-made cables and the optical fibers that make them up. So in this episode, we’ll visit a factory in Claremont, North Carolina, to see how they’re made and learn why the U.S. wants fiber prioritized over other ways to connect to the internet.

High-speed Internet doesn't just happen, you know. There's a bunch of engineering, some entrepreneurship, and lots and lots of money. Our series, Breaking Ground, on the program today, from American Public Media. This is Market Class. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdall. It is Monday today, the 26th of August, because always to have you along, everybody. You know, the thing about this job is that you get to go places and you get to talk to people that make the things that make this economy go. Sometimes that's people in private companies, sometimes it's people in government, and sometimes it's both.

The federal government is investing more than 42 billion dollars through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, BEDE for short, it's part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, $42 billion to get every household in this country connected to high-speed internet. And along the way, scale up a U.S.-based supply chain in complicated, invisible, and sometimes even contradictory ways. For today's installment of our series Breaking Ground, a technical story on how we get our Wi-Fi, how fiber internet actually gets made and delivered to the home. Hey Kai, how you doing? Pat Cicopi here in Cincinnati. Nice

talk to you, Pat. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us and to go into studio, right? You're in Cincinnati, public radio, right? I am. Yeah, first time ever in a radio studio. Well, there you Yeah, first time ever in a radio studio. Well, there you go, first time for everything. And I'm about to have my first chance in a fiber optic plant. So you know, turned about as fair play. You'll enjoy it. Patrick Jacoby is the Senior Vice President of Digital Solutions in North America for

Prismian. That's an Italian company, plants and offices all over the world. Pat is in charge of Prismian's fiber optic cable business on this continent. We have 29 plants here in North America. I am one of only three manufacturers in the United States to draw our fiber and make our cable here in the United States. I'll say that again, there are only three companies, Prismian, Corning, and Comscope by name, that make fiber and cable that meet federal manufacturing standards and that make

it in the United States at a time when the government is trying to massively expand access to that technology. Optical fiber is the state-of-the-art way to get high-speed internet. Super thin glass like human hair thin that carries light, data that gets you the internet. For people who can't get into a plant and see it, describe what happens. Yeah, so try to keep it as simple as I can. So we take a two inch diameter glass tube, we fill it with a bunch of gases, we heat it up really, really high, we build that tube up to a point where there's a size of like a, let's say like a two liter, so it's a six foot long tube.

Like a two liter soda bottle. Yeah, like a two liter soda bottle. Think of it's a six foot long. Like a two liter soda bottle. Yeah, like a two liter soda bottle. Think of it like a six foot long one though, right? And so take it to the tower at the top of our building. You hit it with a high amount of heat, and you let gravity do the rest. And so that glass starts to melt down into a single strand of glass.

It's about the size of a human hair. And it goes up on a little plastic bobbin at the bottom. That's amazeballs. Right? Right? I mean, it kind of is. Yeah, I mean, I try to simplify it, and you get in there and you see it, and you're like, you know what? Pat's not crazy. It is. It does sound like that.

And my technical team and my guys in house will be like, man, Pat, you butchered that. Like really, you couldn't do a better job technically explaining it, but you know, to give you the visual. Yeah, producers always describe what I do better than I describe what I do. So I hear what you're saying.

We'll get the firsthand visuals in a minute. We'll take you on a tour, but we should say here, Prismien isn't gonna be getting any of the bead money directly. It goes from the feds to the states to internet service providers, but those ISPs are going to be buying their fiber, millions of miles of it, from Prismian and the rest. Can you help me understand why the industry needs federal funding? What can it do that private dollars can't or maybe won't? Yeah, so the industry overall, I think,

needs the federal funding because it needs the boost. Because at the end of the day, it's one thing to run a line to me or you that's in city centers, but when you're talking about running a single fiber line out to a farmer's home in the middle of Oklahoma, the return of investment is not there, right? To run that single fiber line miles out into the country to connect one household, that's one of the biggest challenges we've had is from a size and scale of our country and getting everyone connected.

It's a financial challenge. This is the government in this economy creating a supply chain to connect homes and hard to reach places that industry on its own just wouldn't touch. There are of course lots of ways that people get their internet in this country other than fiber, coaxial cable and satellite, but the Commerce Department wants states to spend their bead money on fiber internet. It's more easily scalable,

it's got a longer lifespan than old style cable, and the experts we spoke to said the same thing. The feds have another requirement as well, and it's a biggie. Bead money can only be spent on American-made fiber. Beautiful morning here in North Carolina. We got the birds, we got the sunshine. We get paid for this. Kotobie County, North Carolina is home to manufacturing facilities for all three fiber

and cable makers that Pat Jacoby mentioned a minute ago. It's about an hour northwest of Charlotte, and since the BEED program was announced, fiber optic cable manufacturers have announced hundreds of millions of dollars in investments here, making a bet that those 42 billion federal dollars are actually going to get out the door. Thanks. Oh my God, cast of thousands here. Hi, I'm Cot. McCrae Mulder. Nice to see you. How are you? I'm well, how are you? Prismian's manufacturing facility in Catawba County, it's in the city of Claremont specifically, is huge.

It's the company's biggest factory, 1.2 million square feet. It's also rare in the world of fiber optics. It's the only Prismian plant in the world that produces both the optical fiber, the glass we get the internet through, and the cables that that fiber is bundled into that wind up on the utility poles outside your house. We require safety- toed shoes.

We're here so we've got a variety of shoe covers for you. They're like steel toed strap-ons basically. They are. That's exactly what they are for you all to wear in our facility in the fiber and the cable plant. McCray-Walters is the environment and sustainability manager here. She's making sure we're wearing goggles and neon vest as well and she gives us a quick safety briefing. Don't touch anything. So we made glass. So hot glass looks the same as cold glass. After all that PPE, we made our way to the fiber plant first. Mark Smith, he is the fiber selection and customer care manager, led the way. Welcome to Claremont fiber and a cable link facility.

We were at this facility for about three hours. And we're not going to show you every step of this manufacturing process or introduce you to everybody we met because, like I said, this is a very technical story. But we are going to show you how the future of the internet in this country gets made. All right, where are we heading? We're heading, we're going to head to the first airlock to get us onto the production floor.

So there's an airlock, it's basically a clean room, right? Yes, we're going to be walking into a clean room. So I put on a lab coat here too over everything else. Since optical fiber is made of glass, the place where they make it is heavily controlled. Humidity or dust can ruin the whole process. About 280 people work in the fiber plant right now. 12 hour shifts starting at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., making more than 12 million miles of fiber a year. Remember, fiber is the first step

in the manufacturing process that eventually gets internet to your home or business. So this is a little loud in here. Tell me what we're looking at. This is the start of the process. So this is what we call. We're looking at the glass tube that Pat Jacoby was telling me about up at the top of this story.

It's thin, about two inches in diameter like he said, before they heat it up and add more glass and chemicals and make it about as wide as a two-liter soda bottle. All right, the sign says plasma. All right, we take fine, very pure silica sand, which can only be found two places in the world. One is North Carolina. No, really? Yeah, exactly.

It's North Carolina. That's kind of cool. Can I go in there and look? You can't go inside there. No, no, no, up to the window. It's very hot. Yeah, you can go up to the window and look. I just didn't want to cross that black and yellow tape.

Oh, no, no, yeah, you're good. Yeah, you can look inside the window. Just look inside the box. All right, tell me what I'm looking at. What we're doing is we're flowing sand down onto That and growing it in size. It's got a screw. Yeah, it's getting bigger, right? Yeah, you can see you can kind of see how it's a little bit bigger on the right. Yeah Yeah, so this it's traversing down and it's thrown. It's putting sand on there in that. What is that blue?

Lame is that what's happening? Yeah, that's a flume. It's actually, it's about 10,000 degrees Celsius. So we're not going to go in there. No, we're not going to go in there. You'd get a heck of a tan. Just once though. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This sand flume machine thing is also measuring the glass inside, getting it up to the exact diameter it needs to be

until it becomes what they call the preform, the bigger soda bottle wide glass tube that they then stretch out into that really thin fiber. All right now where are we? We're gonna we're coming in to draw. All right. So what we're gonna... Draw means what? Draw is where we're gonna take that preform and we're gonna draw it down that big preform that you saw growing in there. Yep, we just saw it getting with the plasma, yeah. Yep, we're gonna draw it down to 125 microns. 125 microns is close to table salt, or human hair in size. This is how teeny tiny the technology that gives us our internet is,

and also why making it requires so much precision. I've got presents. Oh, nice. This is actually the very start of the process. This is what we call is a gob. I'm sorry, it's a gob, G-O-B, gob? G-O-B, gob, this is what we call a gob. Mark handed me an eight inch long piece of glass

that gets thicker down to the bottom, kind of like a long teardrop That's where the preform started to melt and stretch down Even though you will never see the gob This is one step of the process of manufacturing what to us is high-speed Internet and it starts all the way up at the top floor of this building So if you look up you can see Okay, so that's the preform.

That's the preform coming in and it's getting heated in this furnace. So you've got that big ginormous piece of glass. So it's, you know, we went from this two to three inch diameter rod. That's like six or eight right now, maybe even bigger. Yeah, something like that. Okay. And then. I love the way you're like, yeah, something like that.

Whatever. Give or take. Right. And then between that, going into there, and right there, there's 125 microns. Oh no, so look at that. So in the space of like eight or nine feet, it goes from huge to 125 microns. Oh, and there it comes out the bottom. Yep, and it's coming out and it's going down.

It's getting pulled. Wow. That's crazy. We went down a bunch of flights of stairs to go from the start of that draw process to the end. So we started on six and the gobs go all the way down to one? All the way down to one. They do kind of assist it to get down here because this little guy is not going to make

it all the way down. Right, right. Grabbing it only goes so far. So once they get it thinned down, they'll get some coating on it, but this is actually where it goes onto the reel as a finished product. The finished fiber literally looks like thread on a larger than average spool. The biggest ones at this facility have up to 500 kilometers of fiber on them. That's 300 plus miles.

This is the manufacturing process. Six floors, lots of clean rooms, hundreds of employees, all manipulating glass, so it's at the exact proportions for the best possible internet connection. After the break, how they know the fiber actually works and how they get it fiber actually works and how they get it ready to put up on those utility poles. Hi. Hi, this is Emily from Paxton, Nebraska. I live in a rural area where the written local news has been outsourced to a bigger city,

and the local newscast is not very good. I enjoy listening to marketplace programs because they are informative and thought-provoking. I learn about things, places, and people that I would not have found anywhere else. I am so grateful for Marketplace's dedication to bringing the news to the people. Join me in supporting Marketplace with a gift today. Go to marketplace.org slash donate, and thank you. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. We are spending today's program at the Prismian Cable and Fiber Manufacturing Facility in

Claremont, North Carolina. Prismian is one of the three companies that make this fiber and cable in the United States and make it to federal standards. And as $42 billion worth of BID money, that's the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, as that money rolls out into the economy, their product, fiber and the cable it gets bundled into, is what internet service providers are going to be buying. And they're going to be buying a lot of it. After the actual fiber is produced, the last step before it can get out the door of the plant is a whole bunch of quality testing.

Testing each spool of fiber for all sorts of things, like making sure the glass won't break in the field or that the data in it is traveling perfectly through the glass. Can I bother you for two seconds? Sure. Pay no attention to the microphone. Tell me who you are. My name is Angel. Hi, Angel, what are you doing? I run the OTBR here. What does that mean? Well, it measures the attenuation, which is the span of light that goes through,

and it reflects back. And it tells us if the length is accurate. It tells us if it has any defects in it. And if it does, we end up cutting it out. Before I interrupted, Angel was connecting the ends of pieces of green and red fiber monitoring the data passing through that glass, testing what we know as internet connectivity. We want to try to get our splices close together so we can get in more accurate. So you're just matching up the cut end to the cut end, right?

And then press enter and it runs through. And it tells you what the signal loss is, tells you how the splices are. And it goes through the wavelengths. It tells you what the wavelength, right? 15, 50. Yeah, on each side, the green and then the red. Man, this moves fast.

How do you keep up? Well, I'm kidding, you know. Angel's been at this for about seven years now. What's your background? Where'd you come from? How'd you learn how to do this? I don't have a background in this. I actually was an administrative assistant before I come here.

And now you're doing like, I mean, this is high tech stuff. Yeah. It's kind of cool, right? It is pretty cool. Reminder here, this Prismian plant makes 12 million miles of fiber a year right now. And when the bead program is in full swing, they're gonna have to scale that up.

And creating lots of new manufacturing jobs like Angels Along the Way is part of what the federal government is counting on to make this investment work. After quality testing, the fiber goes out the door and so did we. We took a long long walk from clean rooms and super controlled temperatures all white and gray machinery down a ton of hallways with lockers and office motivational posters to a totally different manufacturing facility

cabling. Remind me who you are and tell me where we're going. I am Tracy Everkesh. I'm the plant director. I'm over the plant next door and that's where we take the fiber that you just saw produced down here and we enable it to live in the real world. For that fiber we just saw to actually provide internet for businesses and homes across the country, it's got to keep working through rain and snow and all kinds of weather, or be able to be buried underground or pulled on phone poles all without the glass breaking.

This is what step two is for, the kibbling plant. My name is Stuart Parvis. I'm the operations manager. My role is to look after all of our staff that are here. We have about 130 direct laborers and we help them to perform the job of transforming the fiber into cable, which then goes out to our customers. This cabling facility has forklifts, garbled announcements over loudspeakers, jeans and t-shirts instead of lab coats.

Everything they do here makes the reels of fiber bigger and also more dangerous The biggest spools are eight feet tall they can weigh up to seven thousand pounds once they've got all that cable on Okay, so somebody walked me through it the fiber comes in and then what happens? Robert comes in it comes on down here to our buffering line and the buffering line is the first step of the process. Sorry, the buffering line? The buffering line. Tell me what the buffering line does. So what the buffering line does is it takes the very thin fiber, which essentially is glass, you want to make sure that that glass when it gets out into the field is protected from the elements and protected from the transportation and the handling. So step one is to wrap that fiber in a...

That's like a New York City subway announcement. I have no idea what she was saying. Well, we repeat it twice so you can pick it up the second time. So our job is to protect that fiberglass and make sure that it's happy and it's going to do its job of transmitting data when it's in the tube. Melting plastic into tubes around the fiber mean parts of this cabling facility are super

hot. It's a little smelly, I'm just going to say. It is a little bit. This is industrial work. There are tape lines all over the floor of the cabling plant so you don't get too close to any of the machine paste or why does this truck have to be so long this is like thirty yards the reason for the truck the length of the process the time taken

forced to cool down from a hot extension process this war you can feel the water of the air. If you put your finger in there, you'll have to touch it. They've literally told us not to touch anything. We don't need to touch it. You feel it, it's chilled. Oh yeah, all right. So it's not a specific.

See, that's what I'm saying. She's yelling, McCray's yelling at me. She keeps us safe. Well, actually she's yelling at you, but you know. These plastic tubes usually have 12 fiber strands inside of them. And then the tubes get wrapped up around each other, bigger and bigger. The last step of the process is putting the final layer around everything,

the cable you actually see, outside your house for your internet connection. In Prismian speak, this is called jacketing. We start to get nervous around the jacketing area because this is where the most value is on the reel. Of course. We've got to make sure that we get it through. You'll see this is what is called a rip cord. This is made of tableau or what goes into bulletproof jackets. And the tableau enables the operator in the field to tear it and expose the table so that

they can open it up and actually then splice it into their equipment. It's like on the, remember the old Band-Aids when we were kids, right? They had the Johnson and Johnson Band-Aids had that red cord. That's exactly right. That never worked actually. Remember that? Yeah. We can also wrap it with armor.

We have flame rated jackets. Flame rated so that it's a fire retardant table. Where the hell are they putting those fibers? Nuclear power stations. We make special cable for nuclear power stations that can withstand the elements and risk characteristics of a nuclear power station. These cables are labeled. The information's printed right on them so that fuel technicians know what kind of cable they're working with and how much fiber is wrapped up inside. 624, serial number, made in USA. What's the, how many kilometers of cable is on here?

I can tell you how many feet approximately. Oh, I see it. It's printed in feet, so there's probably about 40,000 feet on this cable. On this one? Yeah. Oh, look at all these. That's about 32,000 right there. 32,000, 114.

It's interesting, they're working kilometers over there and you guys do feet over here. Well we work in kilometers till we print it and then we print it in feet because most of it stays in the U.S. There you go. All right, yeah, makes sense. That's Tracy Overcash again, plant director for cable. Pricing varies a ton on cable from pennies to tens of dollars per foot depending on things like how many fibers are inside. Overcash is also the guy in charge of how this plant is getting ready for the bead rollout. So you're going to get busier?

We anticipate, yes, being busier. We're big on broadband and we say only fiber's future proofs. These cables that I've showed you that we've made today, we're making those to be able to survive outside for decades. They have those kind of life span. Here's the thing though, you can't go more than 24-7. So what are you going to do? Well right now, you've walked around, you see we've got some lines that we can expand, bring on. We've got a plan to meet our forecast by hiring for about the next three to four months.

Do you have broadband at your house? Do you have fiber? Hey, that's an interesting story. I've been working here since 1996, and I will tell you in the last 60 days, somebody came down the road and put a fiber optic cable in my front yard. You appreciate the irony. I do. I appreciate the irony. I do appreciate the irony of it and I will say that I'm looking forward to which cable they're bringing my house I'm watching Mary Chacken. Are you going to go look at the serial number? I'm going to see what the brand is.

That's the first thing I'm going to look at it. Fiber optics is pretty popular here in Catawba County and we're not the only show in town but certainly happy to see fiber optics now I would say later in my career, finally come to my home. We're all set. Tracy, thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Glad to have you here today.

Super interesting. Super interesting. 28 years working in fiber, and Tracy is just now getting it to his house. In theory, there'll be lots more homes like his over the next few years as the bead money flows from the federal government to the states, to the internet service providers that'll get homes connected using fiber and cable

that they have bought from American manufacturing facilities like this one. That is, if these places can scale up as they bet on government money getting out the door in an election year when the administration That is, if these places can scale up, as they bet on government money getting out the door in an election year, when the administration and federal priorities are subject to change. ["The Money is on the Ground"]

Coming up tomorrow on the program, the flip side of this supply chain, how the money is gonna get where it needs to be on the ground in Kentucky to see what a billion dollars can do. Alright, we gotta go. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Lize Hasson, Maria Honour, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry and Sophia Terenzio. I'm Kyle Rizdall. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.

Some of the toughest moments we'll experience in life often come with the hardest financial decisions. Like, how much to spend when your pet is dying. Or what to do if you uncover a loved one's financial secrets after they've passed. It's like having this albatross, this monkey on your back that you don't want amongst everything else. I'm Rima Chreis, host of This Is Uncomfortable, a podcast from Marketplace. This season, we've got a wide range of stories about life and how money messes with it, including the unexpected ways money can shape our journeys through loss and grief. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.