By Mattias Fridström, Vice President and Chief Evangelist for Arelion

Numerous tailwinds will shape networking in 2025, including AI, physical security considerations, optical networking developments and more. However, ongoing economic challenges and geopolitical tensions will likely persist. Networking advancements will help operators overcome these obstacles and enable connected communications across global markets.

Trustworthy Data in the AI Era

AI/ML applications have captivated the technology industry since their recent widespread proliferation. Most AI traffic currently remains in data centers and between adjacent data centers to support model training. Operators are still unsure if this traffic will hit long-haul backbone networks in the short-term future. Networking trends indicate this eventual shift, but concrete proof is still elusive. Still, AI's requirements are similar to those of previous bandwidth-consumptive technologies like cloud applications. So, operators will work to maximize familiar qualities like low latency, high capacity, security and others in preparation for this shift.

Internal data quality will mount in importance as operators leverage AI for network automation, analytics and customer service use cases. While AI's capabilities are impressive, internet carriers and other companies must carefully evaluate how they source the data needed to train these applications. Data privacy considerations are vital, requiring operators to avoid unintentionally incorporating proprietary data from public sources into their AI models. Meanwhile, some tools can pull exclusively from internal data, but then you lose the benefits of wider datasets. This difficult quandary will likely escalate as more technology companies leverage AI internally.

Weatherproofing and Transparency

While security on the network will remain critical, physical infrastructure security and network weatherproofing are becoming more concerning every day, particularly as the issues they address are more expensive and time-consuming to fix than digital threats. While many service providers are not actively implementing weatherproofing strategies just yet, increased industry focus may drive robust action in 2025. Internet carriers may also plan their network locations more carefully in less vulnerable regions or bury cables deeper to limit adverse climate effects. Network diversity will stay crucial as ever in the face of weather events, allowing operators to improve reliability through multiple routing paths if a single route is affected by a climate-related outage.

The delicate balance of transparency is also a critical consideration amid the rising likelihood of terroristic sabotage of communications infrastructure. While operators want to share their networking locations with customers and essential workers to be fully transparent, we must also ensure these network maps do not fall into the wrong hands. Further collaboration with governmental and regulatory authorities is vital to improving this balance. Operators can also institute more stringent vetting processes. All internet carriers need to strengthen this area, so we can only hope our industry achieves further improvements in 2025.

Evolutions in the Optical Landscape: Now and Later

As bandwidth requirements escalate to keep pace with AI's demands, continued optical networking innovation will remain crucial in 2025, including the increased integration of 800G ZR pluggables. However, our industry has reached the physical limit for how much data can fit on a fiber optic cable. As a result, operators will likely become more creative with their optical investments, including further use of extended frequency bands like the L-band for additional short-term capacity gains within fiber's physical limitations. But what long-term evolutions can we expect?

Hollow-core fiber holds immense promise. This fiber type allows service providers to transmit light through a hollow cable rather than glass fibers, providing higher data transmission speeds, lower signal loss, wider bandwidth and other benefits. While this fiber type currently faces production scalability challenges, we may see more availability around 2030. However, the cost of completely replacing larger networks with hollow-core fiber may inhibit its widespread integration.

Managed optical fiber networks (MOFNs) may also experience a resurgence. While MOFNs are not new, network operators may see renewed economic opportunities in this area. MOFNs allow internet carriers to sell access to their existing optical footprints to new customers experiencing heightened capacity demands in the face of continuing fiber scarcities, particularly in the North American market.

Adaptation Is the Key To 2025's Challenges

While network operators will face familiar challenges in 2025, these obstacles also provide opportunities for innovation. We cannot control these realities, but we can control how we leverage technological advances to overcome them. By applying past lessons, we can continuously enhance key connectivity qualities to surmount next year's obstacles through the adaptive spirit that has always defined our industry.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mattias Fridström is the Vice President and Chief Evangelist for Arelion. Since joining Telia in 1996, he has worked in several senior roles within Telia Carrier (now Arelion), most recently as CTO. He has been Arelion's Chief Evangelist since July 2016.