Behind the scenes of a fibre assembly plant in South Africa – MyBroadband

MyBroadband was recently invited to take a tour of Dartcom’s optic fibre cable manufacturing plant, where we were given a tour of the production line, providing a closer look at how one company produces 12,000 kilometres of cable per year.

South Africa has a small fibre manufacturing industry, consisting of only a handful of local operators, including Weinert Industries (formerly CBI), Yangtze Optics Africa (YOA), and Dartcom Fibre Solutions.

However, as former Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko pointed out, BEE policies disincentivise the procurement of fibre from local companies, limiting the industry’s growth.

While still at Telkom, one of the largest buyers of fibre in the country, Maseko pointed out that the telco would acquire its fibre from the Brits-based CBI, which then had a level 4 BEE rating and employed 900 people.

Today, Weinert has a level 2 BEE rating.

BEE ratings work on a scale from 1 to 9, where 9 is non-compliant.

Although Maseko said it would have been better if CBI had a higher rating at the time, the government still penalised Telkom for acquiring from the company. This is because Telkom is majority-owned by the state.

The BEE regulations also make it easy for an importer to set up shop in Durban with two employees and get a Level 1 BEE score.

He said this contributes to the de-industrialisation of South Africa’s fibre sector while supporting another country’s industrialisation in the process.

Dartcom Fibre Solutions told MyBroaband that cable buyers must also ensure that the quality of the product will withstand technological innovation in years to come.

Optical fibre cables transmit data using the fastest thing known to humankind — light.

As the technology used to generate the light signals passed through the fibre develops, the cable should be capable of accommodating these upgrades.

Strengthening South Africa’s manufacturing sector is one way of ensuring quality infrastructure is made available and installed in the country.

Dartcom walked us through their cable production facility to demonstrate the intricate manufacturing process.

The facility is modular to accommodate orders for different types of cable.

Each full cable comprises six or eight tubes containing 24 optical fibre strands each.

Therefore, depending on the cable type, it can contain up to 192 optical fibre strands.

Because a piece of cable has so many strands, they all need to be identifiable when the cable is opened.

Thus, the production line starts in a small room at the back of the factory where the fibre strands are coloured.

There are 12 colours within a tube, two strands of each colour, and every colour has one plain and one patterned strand.

Dartcom told us that South Africa no longer has any fibreglass producers that make the glass cores. They must therefore import this part of the cable.

This is partly due to the energy required to produce glass. It also needs a consistent electricity supply. Load-shedding made it extremely challenging to justify investing in glass core production.

After they are coloured, the fibre strands are extruded into buffer tubing.

Then, each tube length is tested by transmitting light from one side to the other, conducted from both ends.

The cable can then be formed by wrapping six or eight tubes around a central cable, known as stranding, making the final product more robust.

Once the cable has been formed by combining multiple tubes, it must be wrapped in a protective jacket and undergo quality control.

Dartcom said that quality control needs to be performed on both the inside and outside of the cable because of the way fibre cables are installed.

Fibre cables are actually blown through ducts using about 15 bar of air pressure. This can push a cable about three or four kilometres along a straight duct.

Even holes the size of a pinprick in the cable’s jacket may lead to catastrophe under this pressure.

For this reason, a computer identifies any defects from three different angles, noting the length of the cable where the fault occurred.

The following photos from Dartcom’s factory illustrate various parts of the production process.