Corning Inc. Produces New 'Bendable' Fiber Optics

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“This is a game-changing technology for telecommunications applications,” said Peter F. Volanakis, president and chief operating officer at Corning Inc., reports The Corning Leader. Carriers like Verizon will be better able to "economically" offer their customers true high-speed Internet service, voice and HDTV services.

Volanakis said:

"By making a fundamental change in the way light travels in fiber, Corning Inc. was able to create a new fiber that is more than 100 times as bendable than standard fibers."

Fiber optics have not been favored in the past because when they were bent, they lost their signal strength. With the new design, the fiber optics can be bent around tight corners and suffer no signal loss. This will mean that we will see more of this in our homes, high-rise apartment buildings and businesses.

In another article in The Star-Gazette, it says that more than 1 percent of American homes are connected to fiber, and that they are usually single family houses. Michael Render, a market researcher in Tulsa, Okla., said that this will make it "easier to bring fiber 'all the way to each individual living room, for example, or at least to each floor,' instead of taking it only to the basement and then using existing wiring to reach the living unit."

Paul Lacouture, executive vice president of engineering and technology for the Verizon Telecom Group, feels that this will better enable "faster Internet speeds, higher quality high-definition content and more interactive capabilities" than what we have today.

Verizon is behind Corning, Inc., states The Corning Leader, because it's a critical innovation that will help them toward long-term success. Verizon has been working with Corning, Inc. to come up with a solution to the problem of installing fiber optics in high-rise apartment buildings.

Corning, Inc. was recently featured in Fortune, and the article explains in depth the new fiber optics that the "brainiacs" at Corning have developed. It goes on to say:

"Corning also happens to be the world's largest manufacturer of optical fiber (it is glass, after all), and when its executives learned that Verizon was planning to spend billions on the stuff, they sprang into problem-solving mode."

The new fiber should be commercially available by the end of this year, and will be made in either Corning's Wilmington or Concord plants, in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, Verizon is launching a new project "with an estimated cost of $23 billion, to bring its FiOS optical fiber service to as many as 18 million of its customers," said The Star-Gazette.