Broadband Outlook for 2025: Smaller, Simpler Is Better

The social push for truly universal access to high-quality broadband connectivity has guided deployment strategies for years. At this point, connectivity is finally recognized as being as important as a fifth utility, as critical to modern living as access to electricity, gas, water and telephone services. Like these older utilities, universal connectivity takes years—perhaps decades—to fully realize, but renewed governmental efforts to fund these deployments in rural and underserved communities are going a long way toward making it a reality.

This goes beyond the U.S. and the BEAD, E-ACAM, RDOF and other acts of Congress currently distributing more than $100 billion of funds to subsidize fiber-based broadband coast to coast. It also includes the Gigabit Infrastructure Act in the E.U. and U.N./private support of expanded infrastructure to serve the approximately 25% of the world’s population that currently lacks reliable connectivity. Much of this funding is available on a rolling basis that extends into 2025 and for many years beyond.

Fiber will remain the central pillar in these broadband deployments, but what I see changing in 2025 is the kind of solutions that can improve both the economics and speed of rollouts.

The challenges: labor, sustainability and scalability

While certain funding is available to help make it possible for service providers (SPs) to pass millions of homes that would not otherwise be economically viable, other challenges stubbornly persist, and these will be keenly felt in 2025.

First, skilled fiber technicians are hard to find, and even harder to afford due to market demand for their services. Second, the deployment of vast amounts of fiber is disruptive to the landscape in the communities it will serve, and the bulk of materials required do not comport well with SPs’ pledges to sustainability in their business practices. Third, these deployments must be completed with adequate headroom to accommodate future growth, even in rural markets. Fiber is a long-term—even generational—infrastructure, so it must be ready to deal with the unexpected.

Everything—including the fiber—gets smaller to increase density

Fiber to the home (FTTH) distribution for a neighborhood or an entire community depends on enclosures and terminals which can quickly become overloaded with cable connections. These points of distribution are expensive to deploy, so anything that gets more connections into a smaller space helps simplify the network and reduces capital costs, as well as long-term operational costs.

Individual singlemode fibers are roughly 200 to 250 microns in diameter, about one quarter of a millimeter or three times the diameter of a human hair. However, the glass core of the fiber, where the data actually travels, is a mere eight microns wide—about the width of a red blood cell and well below the threshold of unassisted visibility. The rest of the fiber is comprised of glass cladding around the core and an acrylate coating around the cladding.

The opportunity for a smaller cable interface should be immediately apparent. Data centers are already taking advantage of the higher network density. It’s all made possible by smaller-diameter fiber, and while the scale of rural outside plant (OSP) deployments is far smaller, similar advantages can be gained in distribution without compromising bandwidth. In 2025 and beyond, the trend toward slimmer fiber profiles will continue, driven by broad market interest.

Simpler installation to meet the labor challenge

The handling of more slender fiber also reduces the amount of labor, time and disruption required to deploy. With SPs racing to take advantage of funding as it becomes available—and to meet milestones that are a condition of that funding—this advantage will become even more important.

With regard to addressing the ubiquitous lack of adequate skilled labor, “smaller” isn’t the only approach. “Simpler” is just as important, and solutions providers are prioritizing plug-and-play handling and installation in their current and upcoming product portfolios. The boom in cloud- and AI-driven data center construction has captured many of the most talented network engineers, so SPs will increasingly turn toward these simplified solutions to enable more speed and productivity from their available labor.

Among the most promising solutions is a new generation of hardened FTTH connectivity products. These portfolios are defined by simpler architectures that reduce inventory SKUs, factory-terminated cables that reduce or eliminate the need for time-consuming splicing—which also requires significant installer expertise—to help SPs deploy quickly and with minimal exposure to potential installation errors. With no clear end in sight to the labor crunch, these plug-and-play FTTH technologies will continue to gain favor among SPs in the U.S. and around the world.

Sustainable scalability

In addition to their own sustainability goals, SPs working with government funding must also be mindful of the environmental impact their deployments have. This matters not only in the communities where fiber is installed, but more broadly in the impacts incurred by the materials used in that fiber and the product lifecycle involved. Regulators and customers alike have a keen awareness of the sustainability practices of the providers with whom they choose to work.

Fiber is a highly sustainable medium for a number of reasons that go beyond its long reach and slim profile. When used instead of copper, it prevents not only the use of limited natural resources, but also the energy used to mine it, which is considerable. According to a July 2024 white paper published by the Fiber Broadband Association which compared the hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) infrastructure, the carbon footprint associated manufacturing fiber is about 60% lower, and the carbon footprint associated with the energy expended to operate a FTTH network is an amazing 96% lower than that of a comparable HFC network.¹

Fiber provides scalable capacity via wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), which enables a single fiber to transmit multiple frequencies of light—colors, essentially—that don’t interfere with one another. As the technology improves, more discrete wavelength channels can be added, setting the stage for ongoing capacity upgrades without additional infrastructure improvements. This vast exploitable capacity is a big reason wireless network operators used fiber networks to backhaul their aggregated cellular network traffic, presenting an additional opportunity for SPs with the capacity to carry such traffic.

Another sustainability benefit that will become increasingly important in 2025 and beyond is that fiber networks require less maintenance and have a longer useful operational life, resulting in fewer truck rolls and less landscape disruption.

The 2025 shift is in progress

For SPs, 2025 will bring some much-needed support from their solutions providers. Smaller, simpler and more sustainable products will help them to overcome labor shortages, deployment economics and sustainability challenges.

Fiber remains the key to universal broadband connectivity—even serving as the foundation for wireless networks’ backhaul—and more advanced solutions will help SPs make better use of funding, their available talent pools and their environmental responsibility credentials. Many of the products that support these priorities are already in the market and, in the year ahead, we expect to see solutions providers up their fiber game even more.

¹Fiber Broadband Association Sustainability Working Group (July 2024) Fiber Broadband Deployment is Paramount to Achieving Zero Carbon Footprint. Fiber Broadband Association. https://fiberbroadband.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/FBA-059_Sustainability_WhitePaper_FIN.pdf.

This article was first published in Broadband Technology Report.

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