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Telecommunications

Fiber-Optics

The fiber-optic cable/transmission sector is a growing segment of the Canadian telecommunications equipment industry. Canadian demand for fiber-optic cable was valued at US$179.1 million in 1996. Demand grew by a real rate of four percent from 1996 to US$191.1 million in 1997. Driving growth in Canada's fiber-optic cable market is the deregulation of the telecommunications services industry, which has increased the demand for bandwidth which has grown with the exponential growth of communications such as the Internet, multi-media applications (e.g. video conferencing), and wireless services.

Briefly, trends in the fiber-optic cable market include the following:

• increasing residential deployment of fiber-optic cable;
• increasing utilization of fiber based applications in rural areas;
• growing demand for multi-mode fiber in LANs; and
• decreasing costs of fiber, driven by improvements in supporting electronics and infrastructure.

End-User Analysis

Canadian telephone companies account for the largest single market for fiber-optic cable in Canada, estimated at more than 85 percent. Cable television companies and, increasingly, power utilities account for the balance of the market share for fiber-optic cable.