Fiber Optimists

Beranek observes that small, independent telecom companies require more customized fiber distribution products. The “big boys,” she notes, make products for the “highly replicated topography” of metropolitan networks. But these products don’t work as well for the more variegated needs of a more rural environment.

What Clearfield’s customers want is manageability and simplicity. The swinging bulkheads in a big distribution box, for instance, require engineers to move hundreds of fibers just to access one. “One thing I preach here every day is, ‘Let’s not design a pen when a pencil will work,’” Hill says.

Like Legos

Clearfield’s flagship product is the Clearview Cassette, which allows telcos to access just 12 fibers at a time, thus avoiding the risk of damaging others. “You need to be able to get your hands in there and work on a single fiber—to clean it or repair it,” Hill says. “And you need to be able to do that without jeopardizing all of the other live traffic in there. One single fiber can handle 56,000 phone calls at once. If I were to break one buffer tube, that’s up to 3,000 customers whose cable TV service went down.”

The patent-pending Clearview Cassette can be configured hundreds of ways to consolidate, protect, and distribute incoming and outgoing fiber circuits in an orderly, accessible fashion. Multicolored buffer tubes swirl neatly around the inside of a snap-apart, disk-shaped, transparent-plastic device. Each buffer tube contains a dozen 250-micron-wide fibers; each fiber has an 8-micron-wide glass core, invisible to the naked eye, over which the signals fly.

The Clearview Cassette also allows deployment of just 12 fibers at a time. With traditional fiber management products—big multi-port boxes—companies might be buying more hardware than they need.

“Let’s say I’m building a fiber-to-the-home network,” Hill says. “I’ve got a 288-home neighborhood, but I’ve only got 24 customers who are taking service now. Through everybody else’s solution, I’ve got to put in 288 ports and pay for that up front. With Clearfield’s solution, I can take care of the 24 customers I have, and as marketing brings in more subscribers, I can add them. So I’m always getting an immediate return on my capital investment, which I wouldn’t get using a traditional model.”

In Clearfield’s fiscal 2008, sales of the cassette reached 42,000. “When we created the mold for the cassette, we figured it could generate anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 parts and last from three to five years,” Hill says. “We got our ROI on that mold during the first six months.”