As reported by Anna Gross for Financial Times (FT. com), the market intelligence firm Cru Group has now revealed that a worldwide shortage of fiber-optic cable has driven up product pricing and lengthened lead times on supply, casting a shadow over ambitious industry plans for. As reported by Anna Gross for Financial Times (FT. From a splicer's standpoint, ribbon cable is “much more user friendly and much more organized” because multiple fibers are bonded together. That makes ribbon ideal for data center deployments and situations where space is. A shortage of fiber-optic cable equipment is blamed on AI data center demands as well as US protectionism. Warnings about a US fiber crunch that could slow down broadband deployment have intensified since the summer. manufacturing capacity met only about 53% of the country's demand for optical fiber, the core component of fiber optic cable. That's a problem, considering fiber optics are the backbone of modern communications, powering everything from global internet. Fiber optic cables have been at the forefront of communication technology for decades, providing unparalleled speed and reliability.