The world's largest optical fiber preform — the large, solid glass "parent rod" from which ultra-thin fiber-optic cable is made — was employed in Wuhan, Hubei province on Wednesday and is expected to boost optical fiber production efficiency and ease the global supply-and-demand imbalance amid the digital wave.

With a diameter of 0.3 meters and a length of 3.5 meters, a single preform can be continuously made into optical fiber spanning 20,000 kilometers —about 5,000 km longer than the fiber drawn from the largest commercially available preforms currently on the market. Two such preforms can produce enough optical fiber to circle the Earth.

According to FiberHome International Technologies, the developer of the preform, all core technical indicators of the product have reached a world leading level. It signals China's mature independent research and development in the field of ultra large optical fiber preforms, further consolidating the country's leading position in the global optical fiber and cable industry.

The process of drawing optical fiber from a preform is akin to the intricate art of spinning sugar strands. The preform is suspended vertically at the top of a drawing tower dozens-of-meters-tall. Its bottom end is heated to a molten state (2,000 C), allowing a fine filament to hang down under gravity. Traction wheels below pull the filament down at high speed to form bare optical fiber with a diameter of just 125 micrometers, which is then processed through coating, curing and other procedures to become a finished optical fiber product.

As the core raw material for optical fiber production, preforms capture approximately 70 percent of the industrial chain's profits, and their technical level directly determines the quality, production capacity and cost of optical fiber, the blood vessels of the digital era.

Amid the booming global artificial intelligence wave, the accelerated deployment of super large computing power centers and data center clusters, and the high-speed interaction of massive data, higher requirements for optical fiber have been set.

The company said the new product directly cuts optical fiber production costs, greatly boosts manufacturing efficiency and expands production capacity and supply, effectively easing the supply-demand imbalance in the global optical fiber market.

It also provides hardware support for the development of Digital China, 5G network capacity expansion and the high-quality advancement of computing power networks.