FiberHome Brand Guidelines: A Wuhan Fibre Laboratory and a Beacon-Fire Name

A state laboratory behind a company name.

FiberHome is a Wuhan company built on a state research institute. It dates itself to 1974, the year it gives for its own beginnings, and its roots lie in the Wuhan Research Institute of Posts and Telecommunications, often shortened to WRI. Chinese Wikipedia says the institute is also known as FiberHome Technologies Group, describes it as the birthplace of optical communications in China, and lists it among the central state-owned enterprises supervised by the State Council’s assets commission.

The institute’s early work is well recorded. China Daily reported in May 2024 that in March 1976 a team in a laboratory at the institute produced China’s first quartz optical fibre, a strand 17 metres long; that the same team made the country’s first practical fibre by 1979; and that on 28 December 1981 China unveiled its first practical optical-fibre communication line, in Wuhan. The paper named the engineer Zhao Zisen as the team’s leader.

The listed company came two decades later. Chinese Wikipedia records that the institute set up FiberHome Telecommunication Technologies on 25 December 1999, and that its shares were listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in August 2001; English Wikipedia also gives 1999 and places the head office in Wuhan’s Hongshan District. The English website today is run by Wuhan FiberHome International Technologies, a company in the East Lake High-Tech Development Zone; Chinese Wikipedia places the institute in Wuhan’s Optics Valley.

The name works in two languages. In English it joins fibre and home. In Chinese the company is Fenghuo, “beacon fire,” and Chinese Wikipedia says the name was inspired by the beacon towers once used to pass signals along the Great Wall: an old form of long-distance communication by light. The company’s own English pages call its Wuhan headquarters campus the beacon Technology Park.

From strands of glass to the seabed.

The ownership changed in 2018. Chinese Wikipedia records that on 27 June that year the State Council approved a joint restructuring of the Wuhan institute and the China Academy of Telecommunications Technology. Both became subsidiaries of a new state group, China Information and Communication Technology Group, known as CICT, with its headquarters in Wuhan. Chinese Wikipedia lists four companies under the Wuhan institute that are traded on the stock market, FiberHome among them, and FiberHome’s website carries a link to CICT Mobile.

FiberHome describes itself as a provider of information and communication technology products, services and solutions, with two core segments: optical communications and wireless communications. It says it has extended into optoelectronics and integrated circuits, cybersecurity, data communications and related fields.

Cable is a large part of the catalogue. The company lists indoor drop cables for apartments and offices, outdoor loose-tube cables for backbone and metropolitan networks, and all-dielectric self-supporting cable. It also makes OPGW, the optical ground wire hung along high-voltage power lines, together with conductors and fittings for those lines, and it supplies copper cable for cable television, data and radio links. Its fibre work has been recognised at home: Chinese Wikipedia records a second prize in China’s 2015 national science and technology progress awards for a project on bend-resistant optical fibre, its manufacturing process and the equipment to make it.

FiberHome also works under the sea. Its Marine Network range covers repeatered and repeaterless submarine systems: on the seabed, repeaters that amplify the signal over thousands of kilometres, branching units and submarine optical cables; on shore, power feeding equipment and submarine line terminal equipment. It also offers an offshore energy network for sea-based power projects.

On manufacturing, the company says it has industrial bases in Wuhan and in north-east, east, south-west and north-west China, as well as in South America, South Asia and North Africa, with dozens of subsidiaries. Its pages show a cable workshop and a photoelectric production line at the Wuhan headquarters. It says it has sales and service in more than 50 countries, 11 global delivery centres, and products in more than 90 countries and regions.

Design and documentation.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Fibre, home and a beacon.

FiberHome’s trade with the United States changed in 2020. Lightwave reported on 26 May 2020 that the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had added FiberHome and a Nanjing subsidiary to its Entity List. Under the listing, American companies must apply for a special licence to do business with FiberHome, and Lightwave noted that few such licences are granted. English Wikipedia also records the May 2020 listing.

The company presents itself through a mission and a set of values rather than a slogan. Its English profile gives the mission as “maximizing the value of digital connection and benefiting human society,” and lists its values as being customer-oriented, honest and dedicated, and committed to continuous innovation. The name itself carries most of the identity: a fibre-optic company in English and a signal fire in Chinese, two names for sending signals over distance.

The history behind the brand sits with the institute. The 1976 strand of fibre and the 1981 communication line reported by China Daily were the work of the Wuhan institute’s engineers; FiberHome, set up by that institute in 1999, now belongs with it to the CICT state group in Wuhan.

For a design guide, FiberHome shows how a brand can draw on an old image, the beacon tower, to describe a modern technology. Compare YOFC, the optical fibre maker also based in Wuhan, and ZTT, another Chinese maker of fibre and submarine cable. For this guide we use an ember red and an amber on night ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FiberHome’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.