From 10,000 Yuan to 18 Yuan and Then to 80 Yuan: A Forty-Year Industrial Cycle of a Single Optical Fiber – From Strategic Resource to Bargain Price, and Now to Hard Currency for Computing Power: How Did China's Optical Communication Achieve a Comeback?

Jul 09, 2026

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Key Point 1: Dramatic Industry Cycle Changes: Optical fiber was once a high-priced strategic resource. Overcapacity led to a drop to 18 yuan, resulting in industry losses. The surge in AI computing power pushed the centralized procurement price up to 80 yuan. The long construction cycle of optical fiber preform production lines makes it difficult to fill the short-term supply-demand gap.

Key Point 2: Technological Leap Forward: China has mastered four major preform manufacturing processes, achieving self-developed technology across the entire industry chain. It has deeply participated in the formulation of international optical fiber standards, and G.654.E ultra-low loss optical fiber has been commercially deployed on a large scale.

Key Point 3: Computing Power Opens a New Track: Traditional communication growth has peaked, while demand for intelligent computing DCI optical fiber has surged. The three major operators have completed live network testing of hollow-core optical fiber, adapting to ultra-low latency computing clusters. Currently, large-scale mass production is difficult due to cost and supporting ecosystem constraints.

From 10,000 yuan to 18 yuan, and then to 80 yuan-this is not a simple numbers game, but a history of the transformation and cyclical changes in China's optical communication industry.

Price Rollercoaster: The Game and Reversal of Four Cycles The rise and fall of optical fiber prices are dominated by broadband strategies and mobile communication construction cycles. Telecom operator centralized procurement is a cyclical indicator, and the 1-2 year lag in capacity construction further amplifies the fluctuations. 1. High-level fluctuation period (before 2020): From 2013 to 2018, the "Broadband China" initiative combined with the concentrated construction of 4G, FTTH access, and tens of millions of base stations drove demand. In 2018, the centralized procurement price soared to 116 yuan. Large-scale capacity expansion by enterprises created the hidden danger of overcapacity. In 2019, 4G and broadband construction reached saturation, demand shrank, and in early 2020, optical fiber was priced at 40-50 yuan, rapidly falling to the 23 yuan range within the year, as the traditional communication dividend faded. 2. Downward bottoming period (2021-2024): Dual gigabit and 5G only brought existing supporting demand, unable to absorb excess capacity. Vicious price competition among manufacturers led to a drop in prices to 18-20 yuan in 2021; in 2023, the price limit for centralized procurement by China Tower was 23 yuan, resulting in widespread losses and production line shutdowns in the industry; by the end of 2024, prices bottomed out at 16-18 yuan, the lowest price in history. 3. Bottom-out and recovery period (2025): Traditional communication growth peaked, while demand for computing power DCI interconnection exploded, with data center fiber optic demand increasing by 75.9% year-on-year. In 2005, China Mobile's centralized procurement price was around 20 yuan, rebounding to 25-35 yuan by the end of the year. Losses forced capacity contraction, marking a turning point in supply and demand. 4. Violent rebound period (2026): AI intelligent computing clusters spurred massive demand for fiber optics, coupled with lagging capacity expansion, widening the supply-demand gap. The centralized procurement price reached around 80 yuan within the year, with spot prices above 120 yuan; G.654.E and special fiber optic prices soared. The industry driver shifted completely from broadband and mobile communication to computing power infrastructure. It only took a year and a half to go from 18 yuan to 80 yuan. This is not a recovery; it's the demand for computing power that has overturned the table.

The Way of Technological Offense and Defense: From "Following" to "Participating in Setting the Rules" Behind the price fluctuations lies the shift in technological discourse power. Over the past forty years, China's optical fiber industry has completed a full-scale reversal path of importing, digesting, catching up, and participating in and leading standards.

Technological High Ground: Preforms Determine the Future The real barrier to the optical fiber industry is not fiber drawing, but preforms.

Application Shift: From "Internet of People" to "Computing Power Network" The cyclical fluctuations in fiber optic prices are essentially a fundamental shift in downstream demand logic. 1. Traditional Communications: Solid Foundation, Growth Peaked. As of the end of 2025, the total length of optical cable lines nationwide reached 74.99 million kilometers (MIIT's "2025 Statistical Bulletin of the Communications Industry"); the three major operators maintained high-level procurement of optical cables that year. Affected by the saturation of FTTH penetration and the optimization period of 5G construction, industry growth is limited, and traditional communications are gradually entering the stock maintenance stage. 2. AI Computing: Exponential Demand Explosion, the Core Driver of This Round of Fiber Optic Price Increases. AI computing power clusters adopt a Spine-Leaf flat architecture, resulting in a surge in east-west traffic between GPUs. The fiber consumption of a single 10,000-card cluster far exceeds that of traditional data centers, accelerating the evolution towards all-optical interconnection. Cross-regional computing power scheduling drives a surge in DCI interconnection demand, with 400G backbone network deployment and 800G entering pilot phases. G.654.E ultra-low loss fiber has become the mainstream solution for long-distance transmission. Driven by AI, the demand for optical fiber in data centers and DCI (Digital Communication Interface) is rapidly increasing, leading to a significant increase in global demand for data communication optical fiber. AI traffic continues to grow rapidly, and optical networks are upgrading from traditional information transmission to computing power interconnection. 3. Expansion into multiple scenarios across air, land, sea, and space, opening up new growth opportunities: Marine scenario: New optical fibers support longer transoceanic submarine cable transmission without repeaters. Low-altitude scenario: Bending-resistant optical fibers such as G.657.A2 are adapted to the needs of low-altitude economic optical communication, and optical fiber communication for drones is in the exploratory stage. Quantum communication: Hollow-core optical fibers are being experimentally applied in quantum key distribution networks. According to industry organizations, global optical fiber shipments are expected to reach approximately 660 million core kilometers by 2025, with China accounting for more than half, maintaining its position as the world's largest supplier.

Hollow-core Fiber: From "Concept Myth" to "Computing Power Essential" If G.652.D is the "cash cow" product of the fiber optic industry, then hollow-core fiber represents the strategic high ground for the optical communication industry in the next decade.

1. Technical Principle: Disruptive Transmission Innovation Traditional solid-core silica fiber relies on a glass core for light transmission, and its transmission loss is constrained by intrinsic physical properties of the material, such as Rayleigh scattering and infrared absorption. Hollow-core fiber uses air as the primary light transmission medium, and the propagation speed of light signals in air is higher than in glass, resulting in a transmission delay that is approximately 30% lower than that of traditional fiber.

2. Milestone Network Projects for the Three Major Operators China Mobile: In 2025, it will conduct the first domestically developed anti-resonant hollow-core fiber network trial in Guangdong, exploring low-latency application scenarios. The measured average loss of the test line is 0.085dB/km, with the optimal section reaching 0.065dB/km. Its polarization mode dispersion characteristics are superior to traditional fiber, and its transmission performance is close to the ITU-T general requirements for single-mode fiber. In the Shenzhen-Dongguan section of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the S+C+L three-band live network verification of hollow-core optical fiber was completed. Under test conditions, the single-wavelength rate reached 1.2Tb/s, the transmission distance exceeded 130 kilometers, and the total unidirectional transmission capacity of a single fiber exceeded 100Tb/s. China Telecom: In 2026, it conducted a test of ultra-long single-span repeaterless transmission of hollow-core optical fiber with a single-wavelength rate of 1.2Tb/s, achieving a single-span repeaterless transmission distance of over 200 kilometers under test conditions. China Unicom: In November 2025, it completed a 4.2-kilometer live network pilot of hollow-core optical fiber in Nanjing. The measured transmission latency was reduced by about 30% compared with traditional optical fiber, and the compatibility with the existing network architecture was initially verified.

3. Existing Core Bottlenecks in Industrialization Hollow-core optical fiber still faces multiple constraints in moving from laboratory technology to large-scale commercial use: High cost: The current market price is tens of thousands of yuan per core-kilometer, hundreds to thousands of times that of G.652.D optical fiber. The core limiting factors are the complex pre-drawing process and the low yield rate of large-scale mass production. High barriers to entry in construction and maintenance: fusion splicing requires specialized equipment; optical fibers are sensitive to micro-bending and lateral pressure, necessitating optimized protective structures to prevent air hole collapse; and long-term reliability in complex field and data center environments still requires continuous verification. Incomplete upstream and downstream industry ecosystem: There is a shortage of supporting components such as high-power optical amplifiers and dedicated high-speed optical modules compatible with hollow-core optical fibers; the industry standardization system is still in its early stages, with inconsistent product appearance and interface specifications among manufacturers, resulting in poor interoperability between devices.

4. Irreplaceable value in the computing power era: The extreme demands of AI intelligent computing clusters on transmission latency, bandwidth, and energy consumption open up rigid application scenarios for hollow-core optical fibers: synchronous operation of GPU clusters requires nanosecond-level transmission accuracy, making the ultra-low latency characteristics of hollow-core optical fibers an important option for computing power interconnection; 10,000-card-level intelligent computing clusters generate petabyte-level massive interactive traffic, and their wide-spectrum transmission potential can support future bandwidth upgrade needs. According to industry forecasts, the global hollow-core optical fiber market is expected to grow rapidly, potentially reaching billions of dollars by 2030. 06

Future Industry Outlook: How Long Will This High-Prosperity Cycle Last? After the price of optical fiber in centralized procurement broke through 80 yuan, the market is generally concerned about the sustainability of this round of price increases.

1. Short-term (1-2 years): High-level fluctuations, more likely to rise than fall. The industry's supply and demand gap continues to widen, and the expansion cycle of optical fiber preforms is as long as 2 years or more. There is no large-scale new capacity coming online in 2026. The construction cycle of global AI computing power clusters is 2-3 years. The investment in computing power has long-term attributes and is not a short-term impulse demand. According to Corning's estimates, by 2030, data center interconnection will bring an incremental market of 4 billion to 6 billion US dollars.

2. Medium-term (2027-2028): Prices will decline in stages, and the central value will shift significantly upward. The expansion projects that were temporarily suspended during the industry's loss period in 2023-2024 may be gradually released in 2027-2028. Supply and demand will gradually return to balance, and prices will rationally correct, but it is difficult to return to the historical low of 18 yuan. If 6G pre-commercialization and submarine cable demand exceeds expectations, the high-prosperity cycle may be further extended.

3. Long-term: The industry's cyclical attributes are weakening, while its growth attributes are becoming more prominent. AI, 6G, the low-altitude economy, and the integration of air, land, sea, and air sectors are solidifying the foundation for long-term demand. The industry's development logic is shifting from the traditional communication cycle track to the computing power growth track, and the traditional cyclical low-price competition model is expected to ease. Considering the current market price trend, this signifies that my country's optical fiber industry is shifting from a past low-price competition pattern to a tight supply-demand balance pattern where supply cannot meet demand, and the industry's pricing power in the global market is significantly enhanced.

Conclusion: The cycle is not over, a new cycle has begun. From 10,000 yuan to 18 yuan, and then to 80 yuan-forty years of optical fiber is a microcosm of the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry. In the 10,000 yuan era, core technologies and production capacity were controlled by others, and preforms could not be completely independently manufactured or mass-produced. In the 18 yuan era, China had the world's largest production capacity, but fell into vicious involution, with the entire industry suffering losses. In the 80 yuan era, technological discourse power, standard participation rights, and production capacity control finally came into our own hands, but the real challenges have just begun: how to maintain rationality at high levels, avoid repeating the mistakes of the "Great Leap Forward in Production Capacity," and how to move from a "major optical fiber country" to a "powerful optical industry country." The dawn of hollow-core optical fiber is illuminating the next forty years. As domestically produced hollow-core optical fiber achieves large-scale application in intelligent computing centers, as transmission capacity records are repeatedly broken, as the first commercial hollow-core optical fiber dedicated line goes into operation, and as patent deployment for marine applications accelerates-China's optical fiber industry is completing a crucial leap from "follower" to "leader." Forty years of ups and downs have taught us a simple truth: prices may cycle, but technology will not regress; cycles may fluctuate, but the foundational needs of the computing power era are only just beginning.