Corning Sees 5G as ‘Long’ Market Opportunity for Its Glass-Fiber Business
Corning sees the 5G buildout as “entirely upside” for its optical glass-fiber business, Chief Strategy Officer Jeffrey Evenson told a Credit Suisse investors conference Tuesday. “Historically, fiber has been a pretty small part of cellular builds,” but 5G “changes the…
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game,” he said. Most carriers will see that the most “cost-effective way” to deliver 5G’s bandwidth and latency performance “is to deploy more antennas, a lot more antennas, and each of those is a high-performance antenna that needs to be backhauled with fiber,” said Evenson. Corning estimates each antenna will require eight fibers, “and that's a lot of fiber for us,” so much so that “we're building new plants to supply this fiber,” he said. Corning also developed a supply agreement with Verizon to “de-risk” that investment in new fiber plants, he said. The 5G market opportunity is a “long” one for Corning, he said. The next decade will determine whether 5G is a “fiber-to-the-home-size business or something even bigger than that,” he said.