Fibre continues to dominate the conversation around connectivity going into 2023, with its speed and reliability making it a popular choice for business operations. Here’s a look at some of the trends we can expect to see around business fibre in the New Year.
What is business fibre?
To understand the trends, here’s a bit of background on this form of internet connection that is dominating the business space. With this system, fibre optic cables carry data in light pulses along glass tubes rather than the traditional copper cables or DSL lines. In terms of business fibre, also known as Fibre to the Business (FTTB), the system provides internet at scale for high demand.
Why are businesses turning to fibre?
Just to give you a better idea of why business fibre is on the trend list for 2023, here are some of the benefits of this connectivity.
- Faster: It’s much speedier than the copper cable connections – sometimes 10 to 20 times faster.
- Reliable: The glass cables aren’t impacted by weather, making fibre much more reliable.
- More bandwidth: This means there are more cloud-based benefits for business users.
- Speed symmetry: Fibre offers equal up- and download speeds.
- Scalability: Your business is likely to grow, and fibre scale up accordingly.
- Cloud: Fibre opens up data storage and sharing on the cloud.
Trends to expect in business fibre
The rollout of business fibre is creating several new trends that will positively impact businesses across the country in 2023. Here are our top five.
1. Increased adoption
As fibre rollout increases, we’re likely to see fibre optic for the business increase. In fact, in the past seven years we’ve already seen a 4 200% increase in fibre subscriptions as fast and reliable connectivity becomes a must. In 2023, we’re expecting to see fibre for business overtake fixed broadband subscriptions. Considering the pace with which digitisation has happened since the pandemic, business fibre subscriptions will rise substantially next year.
2. More streaming
As a result of the increased business fibre adoption, businesses are going to benefit from streaming services, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communication systems, video conferencing and more. This will provide support for remote and hybrid operations, making the workflow that much more seamless.
3. Shift to the cloud
In 2020, the volume of data created was 64 zettabytes (that’s approximately a thousand exabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes). This has only increased over the past two years and will continue to rise as we head into 2023. With so much data being facilitated along business fibre, there is more need for cloud storage infrastructure and data centres.
4. Rural rollout
Once limited to big cities, fibre optic cabling is now extending across the countryside and into the rural areas. This is great news for South Africa, where the digital divide has been exacerbating historical divides created by apartheid. With more business fibre in far-flung areas, rural entrepreneurs will be emerging, agricultural activities will become digitised and the economies in traditionally poorer areas can improve.
5. Increased AR/VR
Artificial reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been used effectively across a number of industries in developed countries, but there is now potential for South Africa to better adopt these technologies with business fibre. We can expect more fully immersive AR and VR going into 2023 for business use, bringing customers closer to business.
Don’t get left behind, get in touch with ECN to find out more about the business fibre options available for you going into the New Year! ECN offers a broad set of cost-effective voice, data and hosted services to meet every customer’s growing technological needs.