Future Remains Bright for Copper as Fibre Gains Ground

Tratos’ relationship with copper is complex. As the company continues to innovate across the range of specifications for cable it is always striving to optimise performance, enhance durability and make installation as simple as possible. There is also an imperative to keep costs down.

The business has been built on inquiring minds, an ambition to push technology to its limits and then some, and, in the first 50 years, copper.

While copper and its conductivity will remain a pillar of the manufacturing process and a key element of ongoing success — and Tratos has taken steps to ensure it has control over its own supplies — copper outside that control has also been something of a barrier to progress. Not just for Tratos, but for the wider UK. Things are set to change; they must.

Fibre is in the ascendency. Its transformational qualities for broadband speeds make up just one example, but probably the biggest, of just how pivotal its impact is.

The truth is the UK’s broadband speeds have atrophied. Many developing countries enjoy super-fast connectivity that leaves Britain standing. One of the foremost economies is losing ground and it’s down to the dominance of an old and crumbling copper telephony network presided over by a self-interested owner resistant to change.

The UK’s economic viability must be invested in fibre. Look at where we are right now.

In the middle of last year, the UK lagged behind 25 European countries, 20 of them in the EU, as well as the US (20th place) and Japan (12th). It came ahead of 165 other countries, including Ireland (36th), Austria (38th), Italy (43rd) and Australia (52nd). * The UK is 35th for broadband speed.

That is negatively impacting business, the economy, the country’s competitiveness and attractiveness to inward investors.

The truth is that a 20th century copper-borne technology doesn’t have to stand in the way of fibre, in fact it can be the sacrificial carrier for it. There are multiple ways fibre can use copper for guide and ingress into buildings, putting paid to excuses of expense, disruption and extensive groundworks.

Tratos uses 3.6 million km fibre a year, 35,000 tn of copper and 50,000 tn of aluminium. That’s almost 5 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower in copper.

Cable with copper at its heart still holds the key to mobilising some of the country’s dominant industries. Tratos’ UK-made cable, with copper at its core, can be found in high speed port reeling cables, in shipping, on overhead power transmission routes, subsea, within overland and underground railway systems and rolling stock, on smart motorways and in some communications’ systems.

Tratos’ fortunes and growth have been linked to copper for five decades. As the company steps into the 2020s copper’s over-riding influence may be diminishing, but it remains a critical part of the manufacturing process.

The company invested around £15m in new machines at its Merseyside manufacturing plant. The money enabled faster production and the production of more complex and technologically advanced products, including low, and, with the arrival of new machines, now medium voltage cable. Today Sleeker and more sophisticated automation saw Tratos market share double in 12 months. Now it is a market leader in field-deployable fibre-optic cables, copper cable, and high-performance defence cable, providing products worldwide, from Shanghai to Singapore.

Copper remains the backbone on which Tratos’ business was founded, but the world continues to change. Tratos cable is at the heart of some of the fastest-changing technologies behind new generation submarines, offshore oil platforms, homes, rail, road and power systems and there are no limits to a bright future for beautifully engineered solutions to the most complex challenges yet to be imagined.

In the meantime, research and development continue to produce advances that are the advance party for horizon technologies. There is very little truly innovative technology in the world that doesn’t have a cable within it or attached to it. One of the high-imperative missions for the planet is how to find, create and harness power sources that will serve future generations with a lighter environmental footprint. Tratos, a company born out of this complicated relationship with copper, is part of the international consortium working on a ground-breaking nuclear fusion project.

Nuclear fusion is deemed one of the options useful to ensure a large-scale, safe, environmentally-friendly and virtually inexhaustible source of energy. Tratos is working on the project at the superconductivity laboratory (ENEA). Tratos provides cabling and jacketing for multi-km of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) Toroidal Field (TF) conductors capable of withstanding the harshest of environments with its performance integrity intact.

The company’s specialist cables have been developed thanks to the skill and expertise of seasoned engineers, all of whom have more than 20 years of experience. Its latest generation of superconducting cables for Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion combine tried and tested manufacturing techniques with state-of-the-art technology to create cables of phenomenal strength and flexibility.

Getting closer to customers’ business and becoming the ‘go to’ company when the impossible or the yet-to-be-invented is required has given Tratos privileged access to some world-scale, potentially world-changing projects, and the nuclear fusion project is just one of them. Does copper feature, no. Would Tratos be here without it? Again, no.

Every day, large and smaller scale bespoke projects are undertaken by Tratos’ experts for its clients, and the company makes sure it’s all part of the service for newly developed and tested product to be installed on site under the sharp eye of one of the senior development team.

Tratos is an innovations-focused European cable manufacturer. The company has five manufacturing facilities in Italy and the UK and employs people around the world producing electrical, electronic and fibre optic cable solutions.

*Cable, the broadband, TV and phone website that issued the findings https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/10/uk-slips-to-35th-in-global-table-of-broadband-speeds