The Link between the third 21st century decade and Technology: Fiber networks.

2020 marks the third decade of the 21st century, with different topics but one for us in our industry: technological innovation appears with no evidence of slowing down. Multiple industry reports related to connected devices estimate there will be around 50 billion sensor-equipped devices connected to the Internet by 2023: all gathering as well as exchanging data. As this continues happening, we are seeing the appearance and development of applications and technologies, such as adaptive networks, virtual and augmented reality, intelligent IoT, UHDTV-3 streaming, AI, 5G, quantum computing among others.

Without enough bandwidth, simply can’t run the applications communities stand in need of. Then, there are two essential things be compelled to all those applications: 5G networks and the fiber network infrastructure.

5G means dynamic speeds, higher to move data faster as well as lower to have frequencies travel farther; bandwidth improvement to get lower latency; all those requires a significant amount of fiber cable infrastructure, to meet 5G/wireless demands. Fiber infrastructure contributions around networks stand the test of time, increase reliability, grant low latency and are key for M2M communications one of the enablers for applications to be run on smart cities, digital oil fields or industry 4.0 environments. 

Let’s have a quick look of the relevance between applications in a smart city and fiber network infrastructure: applications such as large scale data management for smart house, smart lighting, BIoT ( building IoT), comprehensive computing tasks in education institutions, video surveillance, city-wide response, smart grids platforms for energy efficiency, traffic infrastructure enhancement, wifi as utility requires the deployment of massive sensors networks that call for location awareness, capacity, performance as well as low latency, all essential values in an open architecture mostly granted by fiber cable networks, which enable 5G networks.

When we look around Industry 4.0 proposition which is making closer physical network and digital technologies, first mindset thinking is manufacturing; however, there is a significant impact around Enterprise networks with the ability to provide better business decisions; then, one major driver is physical connectivity which bottom line has a direct impact in a second driver which is data and its acquisition and delivery process. For this to happen, a machine learning process, as well as communications between machines, needs to be in place, or more knows as M2M. In an enterprise or industrial environment relying on data-intensive applications based on M2M networks, to gain insights into their operations to improve productivity as well as operational efficiency, 5G impact is oriented to enable new operating models as well as how networks operate. For this to be achieved, network latency which is almost real-time communications is key and fiber cable networks are a must to have rather than a nice to have.

The ubiquitous deployment of multiple sensors networks in environments mentioned requires a new architecture thinking able to support the integration of the massive number of infrastructure components and services, then, it is necessary to build, update large-scale fiber sensing networks that enable big data analysis, predict anomalous events and offer optimal responses in real-time.