The outbreak of the pandemic has led to an inevitable surge in the use of digital technologies and placed broadband networks as a key enabler for various digital applications in home and enterprises, including teleconference, online education, 4K / 8K ultra-high-definition video, VR/ AR games, cloud computing, etc. Meanwhile, the industry 4.0, focusing on digitalizing manufacturing to improve operation, generate a large amount of data for the decision making and other operations such as predictive maintenance.
Facing the rapid bandwidth demand and the strict network requirement of new services like 4k or HD videos, operators need to update their existing network infrastructure to meet our customer service requirements. Moreover, operators need to address various challenges with their existing network, such as insufficient capacity to support future growth, large equipment footprints and high-power consumptions, and low operation and maintenance efficiency.
Fiber-powered broadband solution can help address these problems through providing high speed, low latency connections with high reliability and energy efficiency. More operators have focused on fiber networks to support the continued increase in traffic.
According to IDATE, as of December 2022, there were 899 million FTTH/B subscribers worldwide. FTTH promises connection speeds of up to 1000 Mbps, 20 to 100 times faster than a typical cable modem or DSL connection. With the innovations of fiber technology, fiber connection will extend to everything everywhere, including room, enterprises, industry 4.0 and 5G backhaul.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen average data rates explode. Downstream speeds have increased sixfold due to the growing influence of online video and cloud-based gaming services. Uplink speeds have seen an even greater increase: average speeds have increased tenfold.
The generalization of cloud services has largely contributed to this increase in upload speeds, which have also been facilitated by the transition from copper technologies whose upload speed is limited to fiber technologies that do not have this kind of constraint.
European countries’ average internet speed (mbps)
Source: IDATE
These flows are expected to continue to grow. Indeed, within the deployments of fiber optic networks, the transport technologies are constantly improved. The first PON technologies allow to transport between 1 and 2 Gbps. These technologies have continued to evolve over time and today, using the same fiber networks, operators can offer up to 50 Gbps to their customers. These more powerful technologies allow an acceleration of the use of cloud services towards applications that are more and more greedy in bandwidth and require ever lower latencies.
Summary of PON technological characteristics
Source: IDATE
We are convinced that these new technologies are both necessary for the economic development of our societies and to face the environmental challenge of the low carbon transition.
The needs of our companies and our populations to obtain ever greater flows must be coupled with the need to decarbonize our society. These new technologies must therefore be deployed for both economic and societal purposes.
Fiber to everything will provide ultra-high bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability to address different scenarios needs, in order to achieve “ubiquitous all-optical infrastructure” to promote the expansion always improved fiber networks.
For residential customers, traditional FTTH (Fiber to the home) connection can be further extended to every room (FTTR) to provide gigabit connectivity to every corner of room via WI-FI 6.
For businesses and industries, all fiber network demonstrates its benefits when traditional LAN architecture is challenged to handle high bandwidth and massive numbers of connections, exceeding network security and reliability requirements, while saving space and maintenance costs.
IDATE will organize in Barcelona on Monday 27th a Forum to discuss these topics. It will be attended by leading global operators and public organization that are shaping our industry. We will share successful applications and business case of green gigabit networks. IDATE will also offer its first Green All-Optical wards to celebrate innovative telecommunications operators.
Green All-Optical Network Forum
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