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Lightning Fast Internet Is Coming - Are You Ready?

Steve Brown

Network capacity is the lifeblood of an enterprise — bandwidth enables business.

If you're ever in doubt, just recall what it's like when there is an outage or a major slow-down. Disgruntled employees, frustrated network pros ... it's no wonder that around half of IT staff from network or system admins to VP level and higher all cite network slow-downs as one of their biggest challenges.

Getting the most out of the network is a fine balancing act, so it's understandable that enterprises are always hungry for more bandwidth. Two out of three IT and network professionals expect bandwidth usage to increase by up to 50% by the end of 2017.

Thankfully there are great leaps of progress afoot when it comes to broadband connectivity. Bandwidth availability issues that enterprises routinely face could become a thing of the past. We are on the cusp of a great surge of capacity as gigabit speed internet becomes a reality. In fact, there are already more than 600 deployments of gigabit internet globally.

The mind-boggling speed of gigabit internet is often explained in the number of seconds it would take to, say, download an HD movie (less than 5). But while we can all appreciate the entertainment possibilities, let's not forget its importance from an enterprise perspective. Speeds and capacity on this scale have the power to transform businesses and disrupt business models, as we are already seeing with the advent of virtual reality, augmented reality and the IoT.

Wouldn't it be great to track the development of super-fast broadband deployments as they happen? Viavi thought so. Using publicly available data, we built a visual, living database of gigabit deployments around the world: the Gigabit Monitor. Here's what we found.

The Need for Speed

While fiber makes up the lion's share of deployments (no surprise), there is strong evidence pointing to the scale of cellular gigabit connectivity changing significantly. Currently, we know that 25 mobile operators are lab-testing 5G, and 12 of those have progressed to field trials.

It's fascinating to speculate how such a shift will change public services, manufacturing and retail to name but a few industries. 5G is coming and businesses need to be ready for it.

Digital Transformation

Gigabit deployments have risen at a rate of 72 percent in the past year. This is higher than even we expected. Businesses who are interested in checking the progress of gigabit connectivity by region, provider or technology type can now easily do so. As businesses increasingly adopt agile methods and implement digital transformation, gigabit speeds will be a key enabler.

A Mixed Bag for US Business

Globally, over 219 million people have gigabit speeds available to them. The US leads the way with around 57 percent of deployments. This translates to over 56 million people in the US having gigabit broadband available to them, but that accounts for only 17 percent of the overall US population. Contrast this with the next highest ranking country for deployments, South Korea, whose installations cover slightly less than 10 million people, fewer than the US, but have achieved 93 percent population coverage.

We are still at the very start of the gigabit revolution. Just 3.1 percent of the world's population are able to access gigabit internet currently, but those penetration levels are changing rapidly. New deployments are being reported all the time, and LTE and 5G installations are expected in the very near future. The impact on the day-to-day running of business networks will be transformative, powering an explosion in application innovation and disrupting business models.

APM

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...

Lightning Fast Internet Is Coming - Are You Ready?

Steve Brown

Network capacity is the lifeblood of an enterprise — bandwidth enables business.

If you're ever in doubt, just recall what it's like when there is an outage or a major slow-down. Disgruntled employees, frustrated network pros ... it's no wonder that around half of IT staff from network or system admins to VP level and higher all cite network slow-downs as one of their biggest challenges.

Getting the most out of the network is a fine balancing act, so it's understandable that enterprises are always hungry for more bandwidth. Two out of three IT and network professionals expect bandwidth usage to increase by up to 50% by the end of 2017.

Thankfully there are great leaps of progress afoot when it comes to broadband connectivity. Bandwidth availability issues that enterprises routinely face could become a thing of the past. We are on the cusp of a great surge of capacity as gigabit speed internet becomes a reality. In fact, there are already more than 600 deployments of gigabit internet globally.

The mind-boggling speed of gigabit internet is often explained in the number of seconds it would take to, say, download an HD movie (less than 5). But while we can all appreciate the entertainment possibilities, let's not forget its importance from an enterprise perspective. Speeds and capacity on this scale have the power to transform businesses and disrupt business models, as we are already seeing with the advent of virtual reality, augmented reality and the IoT.

Wouldn't it be great to track the development of super-fast broadband deployments as they happen? Viavi thought so. Using publicly available data, we built a visual, living database of gigabit deployments around the world: the Gigabit Monitor. Here's what we found.

The Need for Speed

While fiber makes up the lion's share of deployments (no surprise), there is strong evidence pointing to the scale of cellular gigabit connectivity changing significantly. Currently, we know that 25 mobile operators are lab-testing 5G, and 12 of those have progressed to field trials.

It's fascinating to speculate how such a shift will change public services, manufacturing and retail to name but a few industries. 5G is coming and businesses need to be ready for it.

Digital Transformation

Gigabit deployments have risen at a rate of 72 percent in the past year. This is higher than even we expected. Businesses who are interested in checking the progress of gigabit connectivity by region, provider or technology type can now easily do so. As businesses increasingly adopt agile methods and implement digital transformation, gigabit speeds will be a key enabler.

A Mixed Bag for US Business

Globally, over 219 million people have gigabit speeds available to them. The US leads the way with around 57 percent of deployments. This translates to over 56 million people in the US having gigabit broadband available to them, but that accounts for only 17 percent of the overall US population. Contrast this with the next highest ranking country for deployments, South Korea, whose installations cover slightly less than 10 million people, fewer than the US, but have achieved 93 percent population coverage.

We are still at the very start of the gigabit revolution. Just 3.1 percent of the world's population are able to access gigabit internet currently, but those penetration levels are changing rapidly. New deployments are being reported all the time, and LTE and 5G installations are expected in the very near future. The impact on the day-to-day running of business networks will be transformative, powering an explosion in application innovation and disrupting business models.

APM

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...