You may well have seen posts about subsea fibre on the APNIC Blog before. It’s been discussed in the context of service loss in Tonga after earthquakes, the consequences of geomagnetic storms, and mapping dependencies at a national-strategic level as the exposed transit paths are followed, and it will continue to be food for thought in this subsea, interconnect problem space.
Of course, another component of fibre deployment is its growing adoption for home broadband services worldwide. These services generally fall into two basic categories: Fully symmetric connections, where one customer exclusively uses the bandwidth; or asymmetric models, where the upload path is shared among multiple users. The latter offers significantly lower upload speeds and lower costs, based on the assumption that most home users primarily consume content rather than produce it.
Fibre deployment involves many additional complexities, including the types of technologies used and how far the optical signal extends along the network path. This signal might terminate at different points — on the street, within a building, directly inside a consumer’s home, or at a shared communications hub in an apartment complex. Each of these variations has its own implications and is well worth exploring in more detail.
TeleGeography — known for their long-running and beautifully illustrated maps of global subsea fibre networks, reminiscent of old nautical charts — have also been exploring domestic fibre deployment through their GlobalComms database. In a recent blog post, they reported that terrestrial fibre now accounts for 72% of all fixed broadband services worldwide. That’s nearly three-quarters of global high-speed Internet connections. It’s a remarkable figure, especially when you consider the rise of 4G and 5G mobile networks — both capable of delivering broadband-class speeds in the hundreds of megabits per second — and the growth of Starlink, a global Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite service that offers high-speed, and in some cases, low-latency Internet without the need to lay fibre at all.
This trend is particularly significant in the Asia Pacific region, given that it’s home to over half of the world’s active Internet users, with China and India leading in user numbers. As the article notes, the growth of fibre is closely tied to the decline of copper-based technologies like ADSL and VDSL. While these older systems are occasionally retained as a short ‘local loop’ — connecting a nearby hub to individual homes as a transitional step towards full fibre — their overall usage has dropped sharply as full optical delivery becomes the standard.
Optical services offer significant advantages — they’re far more reliable, with lower error rates and reduced susceptibility to interference, and they support much higher speeds over their lifetime. Upgrading fibre capacity often involves simply tuning new lasers at the endpoints, without the need for extensive upgrades along the path. However, this capability poses challenges for traditional bandwidth-based pricing models. Once the fixed costs of fibre deployment are covered, monthly data caps — such as gigabit ceilings — become less meaningful.
Increasingly, consumers expect unlimited data and choose plans based on speed rather than volume. The shift to remote work has only reinforced this trend, as people engage in high-bandwidth tasks and applications from their home offices. In a world of expanding fibre deployment, we’re likely to see a growing move toward fully symmetric services and a gradual decline in asymmetric models, except where technological constraints still apply.
As TeleGeography’s post notes, fibre is now by far the most common means of fixed broadband connectivity worldwide. So, the question now, particularly relevant in our region, isn’t whether fibre can deliver, but how networks, policies, and business models will evolve to make the most of it. Another looming question remains — will lower-cost LEO satellite deployments undercut fibre at the expense of national oversight and autonomy and a drop in land-based investment?
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