Broadband connectivity is now essential to everyday life. However, the quality of that connectivity is also vitally important. For many digital applications such as videoconferencing, gaming, and video streaming to work well, they need high-speed, low-latency, and highly reliable and consistent networks. Those individuals and businesses that have such access will have a significant advantage over those that do not.

Concentrating only on speed makes the business case for investing in fiber access difficult to justify, especially as copper-based access technologies continue to improve their own speed capabilities. However, fiber also brings a range of other benefits to an operator, including higher overall quality of service (QoS), lower maintenance costs, lower energy costs, and smaller physical infrastructure requirements. All these characteristics need to be considered when fiber investment plans are being developed.

Investing in greater fiber development brings benefits not just to end users and network operators but to society as a whole. A 10% increase in broadband penetration can lead to 0.25–1.5% growth in GDP and 1.5% in labor productivity, while every doubling in speed can lead to a further 0.3% GDP growth. Therefore, investment in advanced broadband technologies such as all-fiber-optic networks will bring vital socioeconomic growth to a country.

Beyond economic benefits, an all-fiber network is virtually future-proof and has significant environmental benefits over both xDSL and hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks. In 2019, Telefónica (Spain) stated that its FTTH network was 85% more energy efficient than its old copper infrastructure. The operator said its FTTH initiative had saved 208GWh over three years, representing a reduction of 56,500 tons of CO2 emissions. As countries move to a greener future, fiber-optic-based communications must be part of that plan.

Quality of experience (QoE) guarantees will rely on end-to-end optical networking. This has led to a major industry mind shift in flattening the metro to a single-hop optical access that will ensure guaranteed bandwidth, higher network resiliencies and reliability, and service-level agreement (SLA) assurance for vertical business services and home users.

Enterprises increasingly rely on time-sensitive networks to optimize their performance. We will therefore see a push to implement fiber to the machine (FTTM) to connect machines and industry robots in order to utilize fiber’s high-bandwidth, high-reliability, low-latency, anti-interference, and high-confidentiality features. Starting with the high-end segment of the market, we will also see fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) technology increasingly used in residential settings.

Governments should ensure that telecommunications infrastructure can be deployed in the most efficient manner by requiring all new developments and real estates to be equipped with in-building mini duct, fiber, in-building access points, or other physical infrastructure to accelerate deployment and reduce rollout cost.