Prysmian's blown fibre system breezes past 1 million fibre kilometres

Milan, September 8th, 2008 - Prysmian Telecom Cables & Systems announces that it has reached the "1million installed Fibre Km" mark for its Sirocco®, Blown Fibre System, maintaining its position as the leading global supplier of the technology, traditionally deployed in access networks.

The principle of blown fibre involves the pre-installation of an empty tube network into which optical fibres are subsequently blown - using compressed air - as the network evolves under the demand for customer connection.

With the current trend towards higher speed, higher bandwidth services and the resulting need to bring the optical fibres in a telecom network closer to the final end-user, the Sirocco® system provides an ideal and cost effective way to achieve this. It is particularly well suited to greenfield residential sites where an empty tube infrastructure can be included at the time of construction with the fibre investment deferred until actual consumer demand occurs

Sirocco®, produced at Prysmian's UK facility in Bishopstoke, has now been supplied around the world to more than 20 countries in all 5 continents with the landmark project taking place last month in Denmark. The system includes everything required to build a complete passive network - all tubing, fibres, joints and connectors together with specialist installation equipment and engineering services. The optical fibres - also produced by Prysmian - are blown into the tubes in units of 2, 4, 6 (new product), 8 or 12 with the new CasaLightTM family of bend-insensitive fibres being fully available and compatible with Sirocco technology