Fiber operators and builders always need to look towards the future. It’s the reason most network projects start by calculating current and anticipated future broadband needs, determining how many fibers they need to meet those needs, and then evaluating budgets to support the largest fiber count that can be put in place with available dollars, conduit, and space. 

We are already seeing forward-thinking builders start to reap the benefits of optical “fibermaxxing” as AI continues to grow, increasing the need for more capacity inside the data center, between buildings and campuses, and for regional and long-haul connectivity. More fiber is needed to support ever-increasing bandwidth between existing locations and to deploy fiber along new routes for diversity and resilience. As the nation migrates from legacy copper to fiber, ensuring no single point of failure is crucial for local public safety and national security.  

There are three key areas that I expect to drive growth in fiber usage beyond today’s “standard” upward trend, driven by increased use by homes and businesses through existing applications. AI is certainly at the top of the list by far, fed by the need for highly dense compute resources to create new models with multiple methods to pack more fiber into less space. Reducing the diameter of an individual strand of glass from 250 microns to 190 microns, with rippling changes in cable packaging enabling builders to put double the fiber into the same physical space, while multi-core technology enables four different light pathways through a single strand of glass. 

Getting rid of copper is on everyone’s to-do list, with data center operators ditching wires for out-of-band management (OOBM) via PON-based solutions to reduce physical footprint, power, and operational overhead, making more room for GPUs and racks under the data center roof. Other changes include resizing and repacking optical components both inside and outside the data center to increase density further while reducing power consumption.  

Adoption and use of new AI models will, in turn, drive greater connectivity between data centers and users, whether large businesses or home users. Exactly what AI looks like five years from now is unknown, with some postulating that some types of processing will move from core data centers to the edge to reduce latency, but I would submit that everyone will need more bandwidth and lower latency as we move from an information-based economy moving data back and forth to a Thinking Economy, where intelligence works with data to provide insights and greater efficiencies for individuals, organizations, and businesses. Putting more intelligence at the edge will not eliminate the need for overall fiber growth throughout the network. 

Quantum technologies are the next great area of growth, as concerns about quantum computers breaking industry-standard cryptography have shifted from theoretical to likely within the next five years or less. Last month, the White House issued two executive orders placing quantum technologies front and center. “Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks,” Executive Order 14412, recognizes that large-scale quantum computers pose a significant threat to existing cryptography security systems and outlines steps to move federal information systems to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-approved Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), and to assist critical infrastructure owners and operators with their transitions. 

This push is remarkably similar in some respects to the White House’s initial push of the internet back in the 1990s by pushing for all government agencies to have a web presence, rapidly moving us into an open-standards information economy with the federal government promoting the World Wide Web as a means to distribute information and communicate with other agencies, businesses, and citizens. In less than five years, the United States went from “What’s the internet?” to “I have to have an address so people can reach me at my website.”  

However, the deployment of PQC security will be invisible to the average citizen, but of critical importance for the federal government and, as noted above, “critical infrastructure owners and operators.” The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines 16 critical infrastructure sectors, including chemical plants, water and wastewater systems, communications, emergency services, financial services, health care, and information technology.  

Fiber is the only widely available medium for implementing quantum key distribution (QKD). Still, for fiber operators, PQC security measures won’t just be a service to sell to customers but rather a broader security feature that must be integrated into network infrastructure and operations. Near-term customers will be the financial and federal government sectors. Still, others will quickly follow as new regulations and sector requirements are phased in and implementation costs decline through economies of scale.  

Beyond QKD, fiber will play an expansive role for networking quantum computers within and between data centers. Initial technology demonstrations for quantum networking at the metro scale over existing telco-grade fiber have taken place around the world in cities such as Berlin, Chattanooga, and New York City. Ultimately, we will have a quantum internet built using existing fiber, networking quantum computers at regional and national scales, running alongside “ordinary” data fiber and telco equipment.  

Fiber optic sensing is the third area of fiber usage and is likely to be the smallest area of growth, depending on how it is implemented. If the fiber is used as a sensor concurrently, it is also being used to transmit data. The underlying technology of using fiber as a sensor can be used to monitor the integrity of a fiber optic cable and other types of physical infrastructure, such as electrical cables, tunnels, bridges, for fire detection, duct monitoring, pipeline leak detection, and detection of underground geographic features.  

Combining fiber with quantum technologies adds another layer of physical security, enabling operators to detect wiretapping and man-in-the-middle attacks by monitoring light scattering and physical disturbances required to break into fiber, and to verify the physical location of nodes in the network, rather than relying on spoofable attributes like IP addresses. 

Texas 811 is fostering large-scale use of fiber-optic sensing to protect the state’s infrastructure, brokering deals among pipeline, electrical, and other utilities, fiber-optic providers, and companies that offer fiber-optic sensing equipment and services. For example, an electrical company seeking to protect buried power lines may be in the same right-of-way as a fiber company, with Texas 811 acting as the matchmaker and clearinghouse. Trouble reporting information from the fiber-optic sensing equipment or service? Go to Texas 811 to check for known activity, such as a location being performed and permits for excavation. If there isn’t a permit, Texas 811 sends email and text message alerts to the utility owner (s) with GPS location information for the area where activity is being sensed.  

By acting as the clearing house for fiber optic sensing throughout the state, Texas 811 can filter out false alarms caused by expected construction activities that have been properly permitted, enabling utility owners to respond to alerts indicating digging without a locate or permit.  

In the months to come, you’ll hear more from the Fiber Broadband Association about the future of fiber as it empowers the future Thinking Economy and enables quantum technology on a nationwide scale. While Fiber Connect 2027 (June 13-16, 2027, in Nashville) may seem like a long way away, I can assure you that the pace of AI and the advancement of quantum are happening much faster than many of us anticipated.