Hon’ble Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Cabinet Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics & Information Technology, India, inaugurated the world’s slimmest fiber for telecommunications—the 160-micron Optical Fiber at IMC 2023. The Hon’ble minister also ‘spliced’ or ‘joined’ two strands of optical fibre – a highly calibrated process of perfectly connecting the cores of two hair-thin optical fibres.

160-micron fibre has been conceptualised and developed indigenously at STERLITE’s Centre of Excellence, making STL among the first companies globally to develop and patent this industry-leading technology.

This product meets telecom-grade optical performance standards and complies with the ITU G.657A2 standard. This announcement comes after a series of innovations by STERLITE’s R&D experts, including India’s first multicore fibre with 4X capacity and 180-micron fibre.

Laying ducts account for ~60% of the entire fibre deployment cost, making duct space a precious asset. Network builders all over the globe are in a continued quest to reduce fibre size to pack in more and more capacity in the available duct space. STL’s 160-micron fibre will revolutionise deployment, bandwidth capacity and green quotient of the networks. By packing more capacity in limited duct space with a reduced diameter cable of 6.4mm (~32% reduction compared to 250-micron fibre), STL’s 160-micron fibre will revolutionise deployment, bandwidth capacity and green quotient of the networks.

The at-scale impact of this innovation on India’s broadband landscape can be immense. For example – In a large-scale project like Bharatnet, where India needs to deploy ~20 Million fibre km cable by 2025, using 160-micron fibre instead of the standard 250-micron fibre can potentially reduce the deployment time by ~15%. This enables the use of ducts with a smaller diameter, thereby reducing the plastic footprint in the ground by ~30%

About STL – Sterlite Technologies Ltd:
STL is a leading global optical end 2 end (fibre, fiber optical cable, connectivity equipment) vendor and digital solutions company providing advanced offerings to build 5G, Rural, FTTx, Enterprise and Data Centre networks.