Fiber and Wireless Infrastructure Trends to Watch

whether wireless or fiber—needs to be brought closer to the end user. However, the need for continued expansion becomes both a solution and a challenge. As a solution, expansion allows businesses, organizations, and users to lead better lifestyles with increased reliable connectivity. However, a major issue arises when businesses don't see a profit from an expansion, most common in rural communities like the Midwest in the United States. If businesses find there is little profit in an infrastructure expansion, it simply will not get done. This is one of the major challenges to overcome: finding the balance of expansions to benefit both users and the companies providing the service.

The danger of overbuilding

Building and expanding infrastructure, as mentioned above, is a solution to connectivity issues in residential and remote communities. However, it can easily become a slippery slope toward overbuilding, beyond the demand when government funding is involved and not more carefully regulated.

But why and how is overbuilding even an issue when there is as much increased demand as there is today? Well, the government only considers the presence or absence of fiber when distributing funds for infrastructure development. Instead of expanding broadband access to underserved regions, government funding is used to build where broadband is already present, creating the issue of overbuilding in fiber-dense areas and not expanding and strengthening connectivity in underserved areas. In short, the fiber builds are not carefully allocated to the regions that need them the most.

For example, in October 2020, the FCC announced its creation of the 5G Fund for Rural America. This fund will distribute up to $9 billion over the next decade to bring 5G wireless broadband connectivity to rural areas in the United States. The 5G fund will allow the United States to advance 5G and help close the digital divide by bringing economic opportunities to rural areas. With this fund now in place, doing so will require careful regulation to avoid overbuilding.

Regulators will need to keep a close eye on determining eligible areas and ensuring that funding and building target parts of the country where densification is most needed. If government funding for infrastructure expansion is not carefully regulated, this will likely cause much higher traffic levels, a spike in population, and negative environmental impact in a fiber-dense area.

Strategies to meet increasing demands and challenges

For data center companies focusing in residential and underserved markets, this means staying the course. Over the past year, the real focus of demand has been on the residential customer, which lies outside of scope. Instead, these companies continue to sit at the forefront of what is pushing fiber to the edge with low latency, low jitter, and low packet loss. Already well-established to handle the changes, wireless companies and other service providers have turned to these data center companies as a solution when they need more bandwidth at their towers. Beyond increasing the physical number of towers, pushing fiber and best fiber practices to the edge is another solution to the accelerated increase in demand.

As trends continue to emerge, challenges will not just demand solutions but also strategic innovation. To keep pace with demand in 2022, we’ll find that some companies will continue or start to combine services because it simplifies their solutions, making it more efficient for their customers. It’s likely that big industry players will find themselves coming to these midsized networks to help foster digital transformation targeted more in residential and remote communities.