Jacket tubes of synthetically produced quartz glass as a semi-finished product for producing an outer cladding glass layer of an optical fiber are generally known. The invention relates to an improvement of a jacket tube in terms of inexpensive producibility and of suitability as a semi-finished product for optical fibers having a low optical attenuation. According to the invention this object is achieved by a jacket tube in which the quartz glass has a content of metastable OH groups of less than 0.05 wt ppm and a content of anneal-stable OH groups of less than 0.05 wt ppm.