By 1995, several other companies had entered the wrapped cable market: in Europe, British Insulated Callender's Cables (BICC) (in UK) introduced a product called Fibwrap' and Alcatel subsidiary IKO Kabel of Sweden marketed GWWOP under license from Furukawa. In Japan, GWWOP development had become a joint effort involving Sumitomo Electric Industries, Hitachi Cables, Furukawa Electric and Fujikura companies and each of the 4 companies supplied their own slightly different wrapped cable systems to power utilities in the domestic Japanese market. BICC also had a technology licence from Furukawa, but carried out extensive development work to make the product suitable for the European market: BICC re-designed the cable to use loose-tube technology and so provide a zero-strain environment for the optical fibres at all operating conditions of the overhead line; the tug and wrapping machine were re-designed to reduce the overall load on the conductor during the installation process. This included the use of a light-weight (but very costly) carbon-fibre cable drum in order to maximise the length of cable in a fixed payload weight. Being derived from GWWOP, both the BICC and Alcatel systems were limited to ground-wire installations and no phase-conductor installations were carried out.
