What's on the Telecommunication Horizon for 2023?

Without WiFi, our personal and professional life would be difficult. AR/VR, gaming, live streaming, hybrid working, robotic process automation (RPA), and more rely heavily on WiFi. Technology today is evolving at a swift pace. Service providers should keep their eyes on the future and follow the latest technology trends.

Jason Han, Director of Product Management at Zyxel, and Jacky Hsieh, Senior Product Manager at Zyxel have unveiled their predictions on broadband, XGSPON, WiFi, and 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).

Here are their forecasts for what they believe will be the most important telco trends of the next 12 months. 

Jason Han's Predictions
Broadband
Broadband will continue to get broader. 1Gig speed service has become mainstream for most of the residential offers from cable MSO, Telco, and other broadband providers like municipalities/co-op. All the broadband providers are marching very fast into multi-Gig services. All the service providers are competing in the “up to” numbers game - up to 5Gig, 8Gig, 10Gig, and even 25Gig. With all the new applications in homes and small businesses, the need for speed never stops.

XGS-PON 
XGSPON deployment will ramp up faster. To deliver multi-Gig service, XGSPON is the most cost-effective technology for it. It offers up to 10Gig speed, and it is a mature technology on a worldwide scale with dropping costs. With the government’s funding, a lot of service providers will apply that money to fiber deployment, specifically when XGSPON rolls out. With the mass XGSPON rollout and increasing scale, the US market will start accepting unbundle deployment with OLT and ONT from different vendors to gain the most performance and cost benefits, as well as to diversify the supply chain to reduce future risk.

WiFi
WiFi will continue to evolve fast. WiFi is one of the fastest-growing technologies, and it will continue to be the centerpiece of home networking. FCC opened the 6GHz band in 2020, which was a big milestone for WiFi. After two years, more and more devices support the 6GHz band now. Starting this year, Apple devices will start to support the 6GHz band. 2023 will be prime time for WiFi 6E. And very quickly, we will move into the WiFi 7 era. Some retail WiFi 7 products will be hitting the store shelf this year before the WiFi Alliance WiFi 7 certification starts at end of 2023. Most of the WiFi Alliance-certificated products will start to show up in 2024.  

Jacky Hsieh's Predictions
25GS-PON
In addition to XGS-PON, the new 25GS-PON is also considered an important technology by the top service providers and vendors to provide a cost-effective and time-to-market solution for the 5G x-haul, and large-scale enterprise markets.

5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)
5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) has become an alternative to Fiber and Cable. The 5G FWA based on the standardized 3GPP architectures has become a competitive alternative way to deliver high-speed broadband service to residential and enterprise customers.
The new mid-band spectrum (3.4 - 4.2 GHz) can provide good coverage and moderate throughput for low-density suburban or rural areas. However, the mmWave spectrum (24 - 40 GHz) is suitable for serving higher-density urban cities. At the same time, with its flexible installation, the 5G FWA can also bridge the digital gap for the underserved areas, and provide high-speed internet service to areas without broadband infrastructure