U.S. FTTH market poised for expansion

The fiber-to-the-home market has been relatively slow in the United States recently, with industry leaders like Verizon halting expansion to new markets and large government-subsidized middle-mile networks being built, but not ready for FTTH expansion. The next few years will likely see major growth for the U.S. FTTH market. According to a recent study from RVA Market Research and Consulting, the U.S. FTTH industry will expand to the point that annual revenues will reach $4.7 billion in 2017.

This five year period between now and 2017 will likely be a busy one for the U.S. FTTH sector. The news source explained that cumulative revenues during the period will amount to approximately $18 billion. Furthermore, FTTH investments will likely contribute to more spending on advanced services and applications, enabling consumers to subscribe to more robust telecom plans, such as triple-play service bundles. These types of applications will likely contribute to the$4 billion in annual revenue in 2017 and cumulative profits of $9 billion during the next five years.

Understanding the role of high-performance networks in consumer settings
When it comes to many technological solutions, consumer needs are not usually as substantial as enterprise requirements. However, rising mobile device use, increased video streaming and other advanced services are contributing to considerable demand for consumer network services. For example, it is not uncommon for households to have one user streaming video, another personsurfing theweb on a smartphone, another downloading content while a fourth person is playing a game online. The combined bandwidth needed for this type of functionality is considerable and traditional copper telecom networks cannot meet these needs.

These various factors combine to make FTTH increasingly important in telecom networks. However, the balance of FTTH investment is not even throughout the United States. Many metropolitan regions have had access to FTTH, or at least fiber to the node, for a few years. However, some suburban areas are still waiting for FTTH and many rural regions are getting by with DSL services and similar options. However, the efforts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act could make FTTH much more accessible. While the act did not deal directly with FTTH projects, it did fund fiber-optic network installation in middle-mile setups. These networks provide the foundation for FTTH because telecom providers can build FTTH from the middle-mile line much less expensively. As these projects come to fruition in the next few years, considerable FTTH expansion could become possible.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.