Can Corning Find Its Optic Nerve?
(FORTUNE Magazine) – It starts as a glass cylinder of unimaginable purity, formed by heating an exotic blend of silica and germania to temperatures exceeding 1,200 degrees centigrade. This mother lode–shaped like a giant stalactite–is placed in a furnace, until the tip, known as the gob, melts and separates from the cylinder. The rest of the glass then begins to drop, falling some four stories, in slow motion at first, until it is as thin as a human hair yet capable of carrying much of the telephone traffic in the U.S. at once on a single strand. If it seems paradoxical that something as slender as an optical fiber can carry an almost infinite amount of information, here’s another contradiction: Amid a slowdown in the market for almost all things optical, Corning is predicting that sales of fiber–the foundation of optical networks–will help it achieve bottom-line growth of 14% to 16% this year. That’s the same estimate it gave analysts earlier this year, before optical turned ugly.
