How much Fiber bandwidth is presently located in major Chinese cities?
In general, most fiber in China dates from ten years ago, originally built by US Contractors, for the PRC/Army. Most of the initial builds were 96 or 144 strand fiber. Laterals are usually 12 to 24 strands, built and owned by smaller authorized telecom fiber builders. It is important to understand that a fiber network ring typically requires two pair (4 fibers) capable of supporting from 1Gbs, 10Gbps, 40Gbs, and soon 100Gbs, per pair or per wave with multiplexing – up to 120 waves with DWDM. The more important bandwidth consideration is the utilization of backbone fiber to lateral distribution points. Backbone fiber networks cannot be build with large number of directly accessed/tapped points on the fiber. Further use of backbone fiber to build access networks (interconnecting rings) significantly reduce fiber availability.
