ISE Innovator Q&A

With John George, Senior Director, Solutions and Professional Services, OFS —

ISE: What are OFS’ most recent offerings to the market?

J. George: Customer needs for higher fiber density and invisibility continue to drive our product innovations. OFS’ recent product launches include a variety of Rollable Ribbon cables for outdoor, indoor, and indoor/outdoor deployment that can double fiber density to more efficiently reach customers and small cells, and InvisiLight® Solution enhancements for in-building fiber to the subscriber applications. We also launched our Fortex® 2DT gel free cable to increase fiber density in standard loose tube cable designs.

ISE: What are the main challenges facing your customers? What solutions are available?

J. George: In the US alone there are ~80M homes and ~3M commercial buildings that still need fiber
connectivity. The deployment of 5G will require millions of fiber-connected small cells to provide
widespread, ultrafast mm wave coverage. How do we reach all of these end points with fiber?

Common requests we receive are:
• Please help us lower installed cost and speed up the installation, with minimal disruption.
• Help us place more fibers in an existing small space, while making the cable easy to install and terminate.
• How do we bring fiber into an apartment or home so the resident can’t see it and won’t complain?
• Give us fiber we can bend without worry.
• Give us a solution to reach small cells with fiber that does not require digging up streets, that will be accepted by Cities.
• Provide a solution to support fiber to homes, businesses, and small cells, on a single optical fiber infrastructure.
• Design and build a fiber-to-the-home network on time and under budget.
• And with all the above, make it reliable and future-ready so we don’t have to go back later to fix or upgrade it.

At OFS, we continuously seek to understand and address these pain points, and to provide the right
solutions to each customer.

ISE: What new applications will fiber support in the future?

J. George: The new services that fiber will enable will be highly personalized and make our lives easier, safer, healthier, richer, and more fun. What’s exciting is the mystery: we always have predictions but never really know what those services will be. What we do know is that fiber-enabled networks have already delivered more than we imagined in the past 20 years and will continue to deliver even more in the future.