More Than Materials: How Prysmian Equips Crews for the Long Haul

Why Prysmian puts training, trust and transparency at the core of its fiber strategy.

In an industry shaped by shifting funding timelines, evolving workforce demands and complex supply chains, sometimes the most valuable offering isn’t just a product but rather it’s the ability to help people use it well. At Prysmian, training and technical transparency are built into the deployment process. Jon Fitz, director of product management, explains how Prysmian works directly with crews, project leads and network operators to ensure fiber builds stay efficient, especially when the pressure is on.

Fitz sees workforce empowerment as central to the company’s role in broadband expansion, especially as states prepare for BEAD-funded buildouts.

“If you’re new to this, let us teach you about it,” he said. “If you’ve never jetted microduct cable, call us. If it’s our cable, we’ll be happy to provide some instructions.”

That willingness to train doesn’t stop at basic demos. For new deployments, particularly with unfamiliar products, Prysmian often provides customized support materials, on-site sessions, and what Fitz calls “train the trainer” engagements.

“We’ve worked with some customers doing big projects to develop guidelines and actual customized audit punch lists. We’ve done some ‘training the trainer’ for their auditors so that they know they’re getting it from the source,” he explained.

That kind of upstream standardization is designed to address a downstream reality: contractors often bring in subcontractors, who bring in other subcontractors, and consistency can erode. To prevent costly mistakes and misalignment, Prysmian helps operators implement auditing processes early, training internal teams and third-party inspectors on how to evaluate installations.

The goal, Fitz emphasized, is not to catch anyone off guard but to raise the baseline of quality across all crews involved.

“We’re not trying to surprise anybody; we call the contractor up and we go, ‘Hey, you might want to know that we sent these guidelines and this check sheet to your customer,’” he said. “And this isn’t a gotcha exercise. If you want, we’ll come out and see you and we’ll train you on exactly the same material.”

Building Faster with Fewer Hands

That kind of transparency pairs naturally with another concern looming over broadband builds: labor. With fiber projects ramping up across the country, skilled worker shortages have become a major constraint.

Fitz believes design can help lighten the load. Speaking about the company’s Sirocco HD microduct cable, he said its compact size and ease of deployment are making a real-world impact.

“You can do it with fewer people and do more feet per day,” he said. “Very efficient.”

Efficiency, Fitz said, is where Sirocco stands out.

“You can deploy this stuff faster than pretty much anything out there,” he said. “We have contractors installing two reels of that a day. And when I say a reel, I’m talking 20,000 feet plus. So getting in 40,000 feet in the day, I don’t know anything else that can do that. Which, to be fair, surprised even us.”

But deployment speed isn’t the only gain. Sirocco’s form factor also simplifies the entire operation.

“The equipment that you need for this is about a quarter of the size of what you’d use with standard duct, standard cable,” Fitz explained. “You don’t need as much air, your equipment doesn’t need to be as heavy because the cable’s not as heavy. So everything from the compressors to the jetting heads to the trucks that you move it around with (and the number of people it takes to haul it around) is reduced.”

Supply Chain Independence

Prysmian’s ability to respond to growing demand is bolstered by its domestic manufacturing footprint. While BEAD and Build America, Buy America (BABA) requirements are fueling interest in U.S.-made products, Fitz said customer preferences were already shifting in that direction.

“We’re getting requests from people who aren’t even doing BEAD projects,” he said. “We have certain customers that are like, ‘Okay, I’ve been using overseas supply chain, I got burned on that, I don’t want to do that anymore.’ Or, ‘If I have a problem, I want somebody here who can fully support it.’”

Fitz outlined the company’s end-to-end production approach: “We make the raw glass, we draw it into fiber, and then we cable it. So the whole supply chain is all here.”

Among Prysmian’s U.S. locations are fiber production in Claremont, North Carolina; cabling facilities in Lexington, South Carolina; and a retooled fiber plant in Jackson, Tennessee.

Spanning the Distance

While Sirocco has drawn attention for its microduct performance, Fitz pointed to another offering, EcoSpan, as a response to real-world rural deployment needs.

“We’ve taken a really popular form factor, which is a flat drop, and we’ve made a new cable that’s slightly bigger,” he said. “But it can go twice the span distance.”

EcoSpan retains familiar installation methods but includes Prysmian’s FlexRibbon structure inside. That means it can carry up to 72 fibers and still support mass fusion splicing for faster connections.

“You can imagine if you’re going down a long rural highway, this would be a really fast way to do aerial deployment,” Fitz said.

While microduct jetting can outpace aerial installs in terms of raw distance per day, Fitz said EcoSpan was a direct response to real conditions in the field.

“We literally had people coming to us going, ‘Oh, I want to buy a bunch of this and run it down the road,’” he recalled. “And we’re asking ‘What are the pole spacings?’ And they’re saying, ‘Oh, 250 feet,’ and we’re like, ‘It’s just not designed for that.’”

EcoSpan, he said, fills that gap. It’s an answer to the “I’ve got to go from A to B and this is how I want to do it” problem that engineers face daily.

Smart Closures

Another problem Fitz sees often? Complexity in closures. Smaller operators, he said, are overwhelmed by choice and under-equipped to manage the inventory and training burden of dozens of unique SKUs.

“If you go to one of our competitors’ websites for a closure, they can have hundreds or even thousands,” he said. “But if your engineering team is a guy who started as a splicer and maybe two other guys, it’s just easier to get your head around something simple.”

That’s the idea behind Prysmian’s Eagle Splice Closure, a modular, standardized platform that ships with trays included and supports both ribbon and loose tube cable formats. Cartridges snap in from the outside; the rest is done ahead of time on the ground.

“You do all your work outside of the closure. Believe me, it’s a lot easier. Then you slide it in and you get an audible click: now you know it’s locked in,” Fitz said. “You could throw a half dozen of these on the truck and be ready for a wide range of scenarios without excess parts or reorders.”

The Right Cable for the Right Job

Fitz closed with a point that reframed Prysmian’s role: not as a company selling one approach, but as one trying to support the right one. His philosophy is straightforward: support decisions with clear information, and customers will find what works.

“What my goal is, is to educate customers to make the best investments,” he said. “I feel like we’ll probably have the cable that they need regardless, so there’s no reason to try to beat them into a certain choice.”

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