Fibers.org report that the future looks good for the industry.

From their report of the 31st European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC):

Tom Hausken, lead analyst at US consultancy Strategies Unlimited. “Finally, after all these years, we see an uptick in [wireline] capital expenditure; this year it looks like it’ll be up by 10 or 15%,” he told delegates at KMI’s European Conference on Optical Networking Markets, a pre-ECOC seminar in central Glasgow….. “That uptick is significant because fibre-optic component revenues are tracking carrier capex, with sales of components in 2005 up significantly on 2004….This should continue out into the future. Expect steady, repeated growth of that kind in 2006.”

Read the full report here

Here are some power consumption figures for the Y70 fusion splicer. These will be helpful if you are running the splicer off a vehicle power inverter.

With power on, it uses 12W.
When splicing a fiber, the Y70 uses 30W.
When using the heat shrink oven, it uses 40W.
When splicing and using the heat shrink oven at the same time, it uses 60W.

Kansai Electric has just carried out one terabit per second transmissions over their fiber network. This was not a lab test - they used fibre-optic cables on their power-transmitting steel towers to achieve the speed.

Although the spokesman said terabit speeds were at least 5 years from commercial release, earlier this year the Japanes utility started to offer 1Gb FTTH services for just 8700 yen (US$90) per month.

Todays personal computers are not capable of receiving data at terabit speeds, however, it shows the road ahead is bright for the fiber industry. Demonstrations such as this should also be taken into account for purchasing decisions made today. When choosing a fusion splicer, make sure it can splice the more exotic fibers, such as Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fiber, and Erbium Doped fiber, which will become more common as transmission speeds increase. Of course, the Yamasaki Y80 fusion splicer can fulfil all these needs, providing the user with a future proof investment