Discover Air-Blown Fiber® Solutions   from Sumitomo Electric Lightwave

In this day and age, copper cabling just won’t cut it when it comes to expansive networks or expanding a network.

What does that mean? Simply put: copper loses its effectiveness after 300 feet. Network speed diminishes then, too.

If your connections are longer than 300 feet, or you’re expanding the footprint of your campus with a new building, or you want to set yourself up for possible future builds with a modern network connection, you need another answer.

Look no further than FutureFLEX® Air-Blown Fiber® solutions from Sumitomo Electric Lightwave.

It might seem a little over-confident to say “look no further,” but in this case we think it’s justified.

What is air-blown fiber?

In a nutshell, air-blown fiber options like FutureFLEX involve installing empty tubes or ducts where you’ll “blow” fiber bundles whenever you’re ready to do so.

On a more technical level, the reason it’s called “air-blown” is that air is quite literally the propellant that pushes the fiber through the pre-laid ducts, and the lubricant that allows it to travel well over a kilometer if necessary.

With air-blown fiber you’re getting:

• Trustable scalability
• Increased flexibility
• Network longevity
• Ability to run fiber in what may become hard-to-reach or sensitive areas
• MACs in minutes or hours rather than weeks or months

Forget dark fiber

Air-blown fiber also does away with the need, and cost, of running dark fibers. As you know, those costs can add up — from the fiber leasing itself to troubleshooting to the maintenance of unused lines.

Costs aside, there’s an inherent risk with installing fibers and leaving them unused. Namely, you likely won’t know about any issues until you light up the fiber. And, if there’s a problem that does arise, the fix can get pretty pricey.

Additionally, there’s just a fundamental lack of flexibility with dark fiber; the fiber you laid 10 years ago may be outdated in terms of functionality by the time you fire it up.

That’s where solutions like air-blown fiber shine.

Future-proof your network with unmatched peace of mind

We mentioned that air-blown offers the ability to extend networks into hard-to-reach or secure areas. What does that look like in practice?

Consider these examples of local projects using FutureFLEX:

• A large university laid tubes that gives them the ability to scale their network simultaneous to the growth of their student body. More importantly, they can do so without disrupting the entire campus since any new building can have fiber run to it within minutes or hours.
• Hospitals can’t afford network downtime or the inconvenience of closing a wing to upgrade their network. By burying it’s ducts, that is no longer an immense pain point for a local healthcare provider.

Here’s a hypothetical for good measure:

• Let’s say you’re a contractor that’s planning a new housing development of 100 homes and you want each to be kitted out with a premium fiber connection. The homes won’t be completed all at once, and it may be years before they’re all occupied. Installing air-blown fiber tubes into each home today means you only have to run the cable when you have a buyer; that’s significantly more efficient and cost-effective than hiring a crew to dig up a new fiber route on 100 separate occasions.

Give us a call or shoot us an email to see if FutureFLEX from Sumitomo Electric Lightwave is the solution for you.

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