I have recently been speaking with many people around the United States who are planning or building fiber optic networks. Quite a few are newcomers looking to participate in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program’s infrastructure investment funding. Many, however, are seasoned veterans of the fiber business.

Networks are designed and built differently, based on such regional factors as local geography and sometimes historical precedents. There are also regional differences in jargon. I recently saw a document about work done by a contractor that included the terms “jig/lash,” “drive-off” and my favorite, “bugnut.” 

I’m still not sure what was meant by bugnut. When I searched online for the term, I found photos of nuts on the ends of threaded pipe, split bolts used for ground wires and pistachios. Are pistachios also called bugnuts?

What’s most interesting are the geographical differences. The United States is almost 3,000 miles wide and about half as tall, and it includes practically every type of landscape you can imagine. Lush forests and dry deserts, rocky and forested mountains, swamps, hot and cold, dry and wet—America has just about everything.

When you talk to a geographically diverse group of people about fiber optics, you begin to see the way the local landscape affects how they design and build fiber optic communications networks. I have been particularly interested in seeing how regional characteristics and climate affect aerial networks.

Aerial cable installations

In the far north, winter weather is hard on aerial cable plants. Ice and winter storms can be deadly for aerial cables, so I was not surprised when a contractor in British Columbia told me about his work installing a fiber link several hundred miles long in a very rural area. The contract said the cable must be placed underground because of the harsh weather.

He began planning the job based on traditional trenching, placing conduit and pulling cable, which is easy in the rural farmland. But after reading several articles about microtrenching in cities, he decided to try it on his long rural job. The project was a success, with each day’s work installing about five times the length of cable compared to conventional trenching and a cost of less than half as much.

Region by region

I related this story to a contractor in New England recently during a long conversation about installing cable in that area. Practically every cable in New England was aerial, according to him, because the ground is full of rocks left by the melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Even though the icing problems there are just as severe, maybe worse because so many cables ran near tall forests susceptible to icing, there was little likelihood of changing traditional ways.

In California where I live, there is still plenty of aerial cable plant, too. While icing is only a problem in the higher mountain elevations, wildfires are a big issue almost everywhere. We are now seeing a movement to place cables underground even in rural areas, often using microtrenching and blowing cables because of wildfire risks to aerial cables.

In the Midwest, buried cables are common because of the friendly topography. Soft earth and flat fields make burial easy; cables can be directly buried with a plow in many areas. Aerial cables are also not good in areas where tornadoes and icing are common.

One does wonder if the cultural and geographic differences could be a factor in making changes. It’s easy to conclude Californians are more open to change than New Englanders—something I am quite aware of after living in California for 20 years following 30 in New England.

But no matter the point of view, building fiber optic networks is a big investment in the future. A typical cable plant today will probably be in use for 20 years or more, just like we are still using fiber optic cable plants that old today. If one considers that the cable plant you build today will have a very long lifetime, looking at life cycle costs and investing in reliability makes good sense—even if it does go against tradition. 

stock.adobe.com / ekim