Fiber sits at the heart of four major transitions taking place worldwide today. Each one, on its own, represents a shift in how we do business and live our lives, and together they will improve society. 

Transitioning from copper to fiber, extending connectivity to all, shifting from an information-based economy to an intelligence-based economy, and the emergence of quantum technologies are changing the landscape by unlocking the potential of people and companies everywhere. 

Moving from copper to fiber 

Our original voice telephone system was built using copper wires and analog switches, with bulky machinery filling up buildings and gobbling up power. Today, we run a patchwork of old-school hardware and newer fiber and IP-based technology, with fiber delivering substantially increased reliability and resilience, substantially lower power use, and near-unlimited broadband compared with copper, while providing the foundation for wireless, cellular, and satellite services.  

Continuing to operate copper networks doesn’t make economic or practical sense, since legacy equipment and the knowledge to operate it continues to shrink as manufacturers have bowed out of a shrinking market and technicians retire. All around the country, major service providers have applied to shut down or decommission legacy copper networks and are investing tens of billions of dollars of their own capital over the next five years to deliver fiber to households, adding to the hundreds of billions of dollars already invested in delivering faster, more reliable broadband networks.  

Fiber is the most reliable and safe replacement for copper, providing a secure medium unaffected by weather conditions (either terrestrial or space), immune to radio interference and jamming, and offering greater flexibility and resilience for public safety communications than any other alternative technology. It also provides the foundation for next-generation technologies such as AI and quantum to grow and flourish.  

Extending and improving connectivity for all  

Access to high-speed, low-latency broadband is crucial to functioning in today’s society. Banking, accessing government services and benefits, telehealth, ordering goods and services, and staying in touch with local neighbors and distant relatives are just a few of the many areas where fiber provides benefits. 

A combination of public and private investment is driving fiber deployments across the country and into locations that have never seen high-speed broadband, ensuring that nearly every household in the U.S. will have access to reliable and robust connectivity within the next five years. For locations served by fixed wireless services, fiber is the infrastructure that delivers sufficient broadband to towers serving the last mile and last foot, and the framework on which 5G, 6G, and other services are built.  

From a community investment standpoint, dollars invested in building local fiber networks create jobs and keep capital local, ensuring that economic growth and benefits remain in town rather than being siphoned out without contributing to the local tax base. Providers with established ties in the community are almost always more responsive to their neighbors' needs and issues, ensuring people get quality service over time.  

Shifting to an intelligence-based economy 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already delivering significant benefits by improving worker productivity across sectors and, in many ways, simplifying administrative duties and enabling creativity through powerful design tools. We don’t know what the final shape of AI service delivery will look like. Still, we need more symmetrical bandwidth to support information flow between users and processes, processes and processes, and processes and data. A single AI process will dialog with a user, search for relevant information by querying multiple sources, talk to other processes, and then provide relevant responses to the user.  

Fiber provides the unique combination of low latency, resilience, and scalable, symmetrical bandwidth that AI needs throughout its ecosystem. Currently, large-scale AI development requires high-speed broadband to build new models, retrieve data from the outside world, and run inference processes. Still, the future of AI will be more distributed. Inference tasks will move out of centralized facilities and into local ones to reduce latency, reduce network traffic, and take advantage of locally available power.  

Local AI will take place in existing telco central office (CO) facilities, since they have available space and power built to support legacy copper networks. It’s the perfect upcycling of existing facilities built for last century’s telephone needs and now freed up by the deployment of faster, more power-efficient fiber networks.  

Fiber’s speed and bandwidth will also be needed to orchestrate AI across the network, as agentic AI optimizes compute and bandwidth use across the ecosystem of users and service providers. AI is being built in larger facilities, but it will do its daily work within and across the network where it is needed, with agentic orchestration acting as its booking manager, routing processes to the appropriate “venues” where resources are available.  

Given the complex, intertwined nature of AI agents working with other AI agents across the network, as well as the desire for privacy and data sovereignty, AI processes are being deployed on personal devices such as PCs and phones, as well as within corporate data centers. The decentralized and distributed use of AI requires a robust, resilient, and scalable network with low latency, built for today's needs and tomorrow's requirements, with fiber the only demonstrated technology capable of meeting those needs. 

Quantum technologies emergence

Quantum represents the next era for accelerating complex computation, improving security, and enabling sensing at large and small scales. Quantum computing is already being applied on a small scale to improve drug discovery, simulate chemical reactions for better materials, enhance finance and risk modeling, and solve complex routing and delivery scheduling for supply chain problems. Still, the largest threat and opportunity for quantum is cryptography. To address this threat, quantum key distribution (QKD) uses existing fiber-optic technology to let parties generate and share private encryption keys to secure communications.  

Fiber and quantum are the perfect pairing for the next generation of secure communications. QKD is being trialed and used on a small scale by financial institutions on commercial fiber networks, in combination with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms. Additional quantum techniques are being formalized to ensure the physical security of fiber against eavesdroppers and to verify the exact location of the sender and receiver.  

Like classic cloud computing, distributed quantum computers will be networked together to solve large problems more quickly, with fiber providing the medium by which quantum information is moved and exchanged. Quantum sensing using fiber optic cabling in a distributed network for temperature gradient tracking, structural monitoring of civil infrastructure such as bridges and dams, and monitoring geological features ranging from earthquake faults to deep geothermal wells.  

Today’s fiber is ready to support tomorrow’s quantum needs. Future quantum advances will likely enable new sensors for chemical composition, corrosion, and magnetic fields, as well as more traditional temperature, pressure, and strain measurements, increasing drilling effectiveness. Others can provide real-time monitoring of the electrical grid, helping to prevent blackouts.  

The future is only beginning 

Over the past five years, fiber has become the mainstream, preferred technology for connecting homes and businesses, as well as the crucial foundation for delivering critical government services such as public safety, due to its reliability, robustness, and near-infinite symmetrical bandwidth.

Since the dawn of the internet, both individuals and businesses have continued to increase their usage, consistently consuming and producing more data year over year. The dawn of AI is the latest in a series of technology advancements that have proven the need to provide continued growth to support both today’s needs and tomorrow’s innovation.  

The transition from copper to fiber and the extension of fiber to unserved and underserved households and businesses will deliver multiple social and economic benefits, including improved public safety through more reliable IP-based 911 services, increased access to telemedicine services, and more robust broadband services everyone depends on in their daily lives.   

At the same time, fiber supports both today’s AI evolution as we shift from an information economy to an intelligence-based one and tomorrow’s advances in the quantum world. Households, businesses, and most elected leaders recognize that fiber is key to ensuring the nation’s continued economic growth, and we must continue advancing reliable, robust high-speed broadband for the benefits it provides today and will enable in the future.