The title of bandwidth provider Zayo’s recent bandwidth report leaves no doubt about the way in which the sector is heading: “Insights & Trends Driving the Bandwidth Boom.”
The report suggests telecommunications carriers are positioned well. There is demand for more spectrum to speed mobile networks and a new era of cooperation between big providers and the nascent satellite segment.
“These alliances aim to eliminate dead zones, boost emergency communication, and enhance network resilience, but they also drive up bandwidth demands,” the report says. “Seamless integration between terrestrial networks and satellites enables IoT adoption in remote areas, further increasing resource pressure. The future of connectivity is here, but it comes with new challenges for network capacity.”
The report is based on more than 1,800 Zayo North America customers using dark fiber, wavelengths, and network connectivity products. It also included views of a survey of 16 decision-makers from enterprises with more than 1,500 employees. Some highlights of the bandwidth report:
- Wavelength capacity purchased grew by 2.8 times from 2020 to 2024.
- Metro dark fiber purchases rose 268%, and long-haul dark fiber purchases climbed 52.6% year-over-year (YoY) from 2023 to 2024.
- In 2024, 400G wavelengths accounted for the largest total terabits (Tb) purchased, outpacing 10G and 100G solutions. Between 2020–2024, hyperscalers and carriers made 91.2% of all metro dark fiber purchases and 66.8% of all wavelength deals exceeding 1Tb of capacity.
- AI use cases are spurring a record number of large-scale wavelength and fiber purchases, predominantly by hyperscalers, software and tech companies.
- Demand for long-haul routes and metro wavelength connectivity skyrocketed in Memphis and Salt Lake City, increasing by 4,300% and 348.28% year-over-year, respectively from 2023 to 2024.
- Enterprises prioritize scalability, hybrid cloud optimization, and security for sensitive workloads, while balancing cost and performance.
Rural broadband providers are benefitting by the demand described in the Zayo bandwidth report. In a session earlier this year at the NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association RTIME conference in San Antonio, Texas, Jeff Johnston, CoBank’s Lead Economist of Digital Infrastructure described the growth of rural broadband providers.
He said the average annual data demand increased from 16 Zettabytes during 2011–2019 to 71 Zettabytes during the COVID pandemic (2020–2021) to 124 Zettabytes today. This is expected to increase more than 200%, to 394 Zettabytes, by 2028. (A Zettabyte equals one billion Terabytes, or one sextillion bytes.) The demands of AI also are a driver, Johnston said.
