Another year has passed, and we have nothing revolutionary to report about fiber optic technology—no instant-on connectors, dirt-cheap lasers or simple solutions to installation problems. About the only unique improvement we saw was discussed at an advanced technology meeting, where a developer of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) made the claim that he could do cheap 100-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) links if the fiber community would make some special single-mode fiber for him. That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.


That doesn’t mean that no good things are happening on the fiber front. Fiber usage is growing steadily with some new applications, big names promoting older applications and some component developments that facilitate installations.


For the last few years, we’ve been talking about fiber’s use in wireless communications. This past year showed real growth in these areas, as wireless bandwidth started meeting consumer demand for mobile data and video. If you want good examples, look at sports facilities.


Recently, the San Francisco 49ers built a new football stadium to replace Candlestick Park. Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., seats about 70,000, and, during a recent game, about 60 percent of the fans using their smartphones and tablets consumed more than 1 Gbps of data for 2 hours, adding up to 2.13 terabytes of data during the game. The stadium has more than 700 cellular antennas, more than 600 Wi-Fi antennas, 12,000 Ethernet ports and a 40-Gbps fiber optic connection to the stadium. This is not even including the miles and miles of fiber connecting big-screen TVs, monitors and network TV broadcast feeds.


All sports facilities now have to provide this kind of wireless coverage, as do convention centers, airports and other large public spaces. Many of these structures already have distributed antenna systems for internal communications, but many are requiring upgrades as user demand grows. These internal systems are based on fiber optics, often sharing cables with their data networks, building security and management systems, closed-circuit television, and other building systems.


Fiber to the antenna on cell towers is another growing application driven by consumer demand for wireless bandwidth. With more than 300,000 towers in the United States and almost 4 million worldwide, this is indeed a big market. The current architecture uses fiber up the tower to a remote radio head that drives old-style passive antennas, but we are already seeing a new generation of active antennas that only need fiber and direct current (DC) power direct from the base of the tower.


In a similar technology upgrade, so-called “small cells,” which are small enough to hold in your hand, are starting to be used in metropolitan areas. The concept is similar to metro Wi-Fi, but it uses cellular connections instead. These miniature active antennas can be mounted anywhere—e.g., on street lights, traffic signals or the sides of buildings—to provide coverage to small areas where larger cellular antennas are impractical. Again, all they need is a single fiber to the antenna with some DC power.


Schools are now focusing on wireless to accommodate new devices being brought into the classroom. Last year, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler discovered that government grant money was available to wire classrooms but not install wireless or get schools connected on faster broadband. Wheeler changed that fast. Now that schools can be upgraded to good Wi-Fi coverage and faster broadband connections using government grants, expect to see a large number of school projects in the near future.


School administrators are also discovering the economies of converting to passive optical LANs (OLANs) based on fiber to the home (FTTH) technology. Colleges are adopting it because these facilities need many connections for classrooms, offices and dorms at high speed for wireless and wired connections (better for video). City school systems are adopting OLANs because an entire school system can run on a single passive OLAN system instead of having separate systems at each school. The savings are really big, even when these facilities have to run fiber between schools.


The government and military have adopted passive OLANs for several years now, but enterprise networks are just getting started. Some corporate users have been reluctant to adopt a new network architecture, but the push for OLANs by IBM and recent market entry by network giant Cisco should help convince the skeptics. New hardware focused on smaller LANs, down to 50 users, will also broaden OLAN appeal.


Single-mode fiber use is growing in data centers as owners look to 40- and 100-Gbps upgrades, and development has started on 400-Gbps. Data center architectures and speeds are convincing users to move to single-mode due to near-unlimited bandwidth, which simplifies the rapid upgrades needed to stay competitive in data center technologies.


The growth in passive OLANs and data centers means more single-mode fiber for premises cabling, so it’s time to upgrade your knowledge, skills and equipment to be able to take advantage of these opportunities.