Experts Agree That Fiber Remains the 'Gold Standard' but May Not Be Built Everywhere
Americans want the broadband speeds that come with fiber everywhere, but satisfying that demand isn’t possible, said telecom consultant Jimmy Schaeffler, chairman of the Carmel Group, during a Broadband Breakfast webinar Wednesday. Other speakers said the U.S. should keep focusing on deploying fiber to as many locations as possible.
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Fiber is “America’s gold standard when it comes to ultra-high-speed broadband content delivery,” and fiber-like speeds will become “more mainstreamed,” Schaeffler said. “Competitive businesses” including medicine, education, entertainment and cloud computing “will push for higher speeds,” he said. “Fiber cannot be built and cannot work everywhere,” and it's not affordable in some markets. “This may hold true for many years to come.” Today, the only other broadband choices are satellite operators and fixed and mobile wireless, he said.
Schaeffler also said network realities are helping consumers make choices among providers. If content doesn’t load quickly enough on a device, typically in 2-4 seconds, “users will go elsewhere.” In addition, companies like Disney and Fox are pushing “hyper-personalization of the browser experience, especially for ads.” Most broadcasters can’t meet that demand, and satellite TV and standard-cable providers may also struggle, he said.
Consumers expect video to be delivered seamlessly in a house, even when several people there are watching different HD movies at the same time, Schaeffler said. Broadband “just has to work. … The only question is: Will wireless be enough, and for how long?”
The average speed in the U.S. is more than 500 Mbps, noted Glenn Ricart, chief technology officer at the think tank US Ignite. That’s “a real testament to how we’ve been able to bring down the cost of a gigabit and a terabit,” he said. “People are willing to spend a certain amount of money, and they appreciate the additional speed, the additional clarity.” They want to buy 4K TVs and for their kids to be able to download educational material from the schools, he added.
US Ignite worked with Cleveland, formerly the least connected big city in the U.S., to install broadband citywide, Ricart said. The city chose wireless technology that could be installed quickly, he said, and now everyone there can get 500 Mbps service for $18 a month. “It made a substantial difference” in the jobs people could take, the education of students and the quality of health care. High-speed broadband is becoming “a really integral part of taking America forward.”
Bob Whitman, vice president of market and product strategy at Corning Optical Communications, said many communities, including rural areas, will need fiber, especially with AI "really taking off." Data centers are being built in rural areas because they need access to power and space, but they also need fiber infrastructure, he said.
Whitman noted that nearly 80 million homes in the U.S. have access to fiber, though many don’t subscribe. It’s “becoming mainstream” to offer gigabit speed, and competition is growing, he added. “We’re reaching peak years of deployment for fiber-based broadband,” with more than 10 million homes added every year. “We’re going to get it out to almost everybody.”
A wireless network today is essentially a fiber network with antennas on the end, Whitman said. “All those antennas need to be fed with fiber,” he said. “Any application that requires higher bandwidth and lower latency is going to be run on a fiber network.”
“We need fiber everywhere -- we need lots more of everything,” said William Lehr, an economist and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and AI Lab. It has been clear for decades that people will need to be able to “augment” everything they do with “digital resources," but that only leaped "into the public consciousness” with the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, Lehr said.
The “future vision of pervasive computing” means that “everything, everywhere always has the potential to be augmented by digital resources on demand,” Lehr said. There needs to be better infrastructure so it isn’t the bottleneck for what AI can do to improve “all kinds of things,” he said. As speeds get faster, other performance attributes -- including latency, availability and reliability -- “become much more important.”
“Every community … needs high-speed connectivity to wide-area networks today” at gigabit speeds or higher, Lehr said. “In almost all cases, it should be fiber.” Everyone on the panel seems to agree that “fiber is the technology of the future” and will “future-proof” new homes when they’re being built, he added.