Global Shortage of Fibre Optic Cable Threatens Digital Growth (ft.com) 22
A worldwide shortage of fibre optic cable has driven up prices and lengthened lead times, endangering companies' ambitious plans to roll out state of the art telecommunications infrastructure. From a report: Europe, India and China are among the regions most affected by the crunch, with prices for fibre rising by up to 70 per cent from record lows in March 2021, from $3.70 to $6.30 per fibre km, according to Cru Group, a market intelligence firm. Although the pandemic prompted some of the biggest tech and telecoms groups to slash their capex, there has been a surge in demand for internet and data services, leading to a shortfall in availability of the crucial but often overlooked material.
Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta are expanding their data centre empires to meet soaring demand, including laying vast international fibre networks under the ocean. Meanwhile, governments have set ambitious targets for the rollout of superfast broadband and 5G, both of which require vast quantities of fibre optic cable to be laid under the ground. Total cable consumption increased by 8.1 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same time last year, according to Cru estimates. China accounted for 46 per cent of the total, with North America representing the fastest growing region, at 15 per cent year on year.
Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta are expanding their data centre empires to meet soaring demand, including laying vast international fibre networks under the ocean. Meanwhile, governments have set ambitious targets for the rollout of superfast broadband and 5G, both of which require vast quantities of fibre optic cable to be laid under the ground. Total cable consumption increased by 8.1 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same time last year, according to Cru estimates. China accounted for 46 per cent of the total, with North America representing the fastest growing region, at 15 per cent year on year.
Seems like an outsized increase (Score:2)
Decided to randomly check current prices of custom MTP cables I got for my house last year... and they were 3x what I paid.
An 8% increase in sales alone would not seem to be sufficient justification for the increase in price.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Always a shortage of SOMETHING lately.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I honestly don't believe half of this is legitimate. Since the COVID lockdown, companies learned they can just cut back production and create a "shortage" and then triple prices. Everyone believes you right now if you say you just can't produce enough of X, Y or Z. You can claim worker shortages or whatever you like as the excuse.
At our local grocery stores, they've randomly had shortages of all sorts of random items. You never know what they'll claim is in short supply on a given week. And it seems to change constantly, too.
Re:Always a shortage of SOMETHING lately.... (Score:5, Funny)
The shortages are real. Turns out it's just people like this guy.
Re: (Score:2)
All of these long term trends have a point where 'the rubber meets the road' and we actually start seeing/feeling the effects of what we have know all a long. For the economy (speaking primarily of the US economy) the labor force participation rate is way down.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
And if you look at the chart of the percentage of people > 65 y.o. that tells the same story. Around 2000's it was 12% now up to 22% in the US. What's freaky is that places we think of as having really old popula
Inflation: the never-ending story generator (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called an "everything shortage" for a reason. The primary shortages are in energy and labour. The energy shortage is mostly due to Russia, and the labour shortage is mostly due to a large generation retiring and a smaller generation graduating from school. The pandemic just poured fuel on the fire by convincing a bunch of people close to retirement to just go ahead and retire, by lowering worker productivity, and by screwing around with global supply and demand for a couple years, but COVID isn't the root cause.
Energy and labour are inputs to pretty much everything, so we literally can't produce as much as we did in 2019, and there's no expectation that this is going to change. It takes 18 years to make an adult. But since one of the shortages is labour, that means companies keep outbidding each other for workers. Add energy prices to this, and guess what... super-high inflation across the board. The inflation will end when we learn to live with less. We need to make some tough choices. What are we willing to go without? You don't have to answer that... the market will figure it out.
In the meantime, news organizations can now cut costs by firing all the journalists and copy/pasting "news" articles about rising prices and just do a search and replace.
Re: (Score:1)
Ah yes blaming the working class for inflation. Inflation has outpaced wages for decades and even with this new shift wages still haven’t matched what they should be. Kind of strange that inflation drives everything except pay.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The millennials were a (relatively) large cohort.
More blame on individuals and it's bullshit. The trend has been going since long before the dreaded millennials were even born. https://cepr.net/this-is-what-... [cepr.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Inflation: the never-ending story generator (Score:2)
Prices seem low (Score:2)
Are those prices in the story here accurate? $3.70 to $6.30 per fibre km ? I tried to click through to the story but it's paywalled.
If they are accurate, that seems incredibly cheap, $6 per km? Surely even the cost in terms of paying people to lay the stuff will be far higher, vastly so if you have to dig trenches or something.
Re: (Score:3)
I believe that's the commodity price per strand of bare glass. Looks like it's specifically strands meeting G.652.D specs.
And in fact, it is incredibly cheap. It's coming up from a record low and it still hasn't reached 2018 prices of closer to $9 if I'm reading random sources on the Internet correctly. But it's not the material cost of what's being buried in the ground, which is multiple strands, both individually and together sheathed.
Re: (Score:2)
Surely even the cost in terms of paying people to lay the stuff will be far higher,
Yes. Not a telecom guy. But our power company charged $5 per foot to lay cable. Less to hang it on poles (trenching is a bitch). The cable cost on the order of $0.50 a foot (aluminum conductor).
Why is there (almost) no consumer fiber optics? (Score:2)
Isn't copper more expensive that fiber optics? Doesn't fiber use less electricity than copper?
I've always wondered why they don't make an HDMI, consumer ethernet, or thunderbolt successor that is fiber optic. (and make it mainstream...yes, I know I can buy sp
Re: (Score:3)
As somebody who wired up their house with fiber:
Yes, fiber is cheap especially for the bandwidth provided. You can pack an ungodly amount of data even into the cheap stuff. It's less cheap if you consider you're going to need two SFP+ modules per fiber, so that's $100-ish per fiber connection, plus of course the cost of having the switches/cards to plug that into (try Mikrotik, it's decent and very affordable). Ove
Outside paywall (Score:2)
Sounds irrelevant (Score:2)
At least I would expect that laying 1km of fiber is much, much more expensive than this increase.