Aluminium cable

Saw a post by Facebook Engineering that they are teaming up with Alcatel Submarine cables and exploring the use of aluminium cable for submarine application instead of copper or fibre. I thought Ali was a no no in digital signal transmission judging by poor performance in the last leg of FTTC on Openreach plant. I always thought Aluminium had limted bandwidth and wasn't preferable?

It often produces higher attenuation than the same run in copper.

It goes �brittle� in some scenarios and so can produce fault prone joints.

Hi

Aluminium is only poor regarding FTTC because that's using plain old telephone cable. Copper telephone cable, never being designed for data, is already poor, aluminium is then poor some more.

All cables have attenuation, aluminium being worse than copper, but if you increase the aluminium cross sectional area used that can over come that, and/or you just adjust the type of signal passing through it to compensate or cope with any loses. Maybe it needs repeaters more often as well, or jointing takes more time. Aluminium as pointed out can also suffer more mechanical breaks and corrosion, again by designing the cable with more/stronger armour and vapour barriers will help compensate. The trouble is, by the time you've gone to all that trouble to bring aluminium up to the same sort of performance levels as copper, it's not much cheaper!

Regards

Phil

Can't believe aluminium would out perform fibre under any scenario, its an absolute nightmare that's why they normally apply a coating of copper to the outside (aka CCA) to try to make it a little more bearable.

I don't think they are using aluminium as a transmission medium but as as a power conductor for the fibre repeaters

Not quite the same thing,but it was used in electricity power supply. I forget the name but it was a high tensile
version used in 11kv open wire overhead lines.
A real nightmare particularly if used near sea coast because of the salt making things even worse.

All overhead national grid cables you see strung between pylons are either traditionally aluminum conductor steel reinforced or more recently aluminium conductor carbon core. As others have said the aluminium will be for powering the repeaters because nobody in their right mind would use anything other than fibre optics for data transmission in these scenarios.

Maybe you have misinterpreted the reason for aluminium use.

http://engineeringjobs4u.co.uk/using-aluminum-conduc...

That article goes some way to explain the facebook post I saw yesterday.