2025 Will Bring.... We don't have a crystal ball so we don't do a lot of speculation, but we are willing to share what we are watching for. We expect both land and sea systems to continue to be strong. Data centers, we're not so sure about. While investors continue to fund AI startups with $billions needed for data centers dedicated to AI, we know investors are poor predictors of market success because they follow the hype. The cracks in the the AI hype are already starting to appear. Some claim it has already been trained on all the data on the Internet, possible since that is how search engines work, so now it's training on the misinformation it created itself or users are finding it is unable to reason simple tasks like word problems in math. And the power consumption problem is not easily solved. Like 5G, the hype overshadowed the reality at first, but reality eventually won out. FTTH continues strong everywhere because it is a sensible solution, new products ease installation and the cost has become reasonable. In the US, FTTH is going to face a new problem and it is not cost, it's politics. The change in US administrations may signal a decline in funding for fiber broadband and a move to use low earth orbit satellites instead. It is interesting (scary?) to consider how technology markets are so vulnerable to hype. Fiber optics has weathered economic fluctuations in the past, but has proven highly vulnerable to hype. The hype over the Internet in the late 1990s created a frenzy in the fiber optics marketplace, but the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001 devastated the industry. The hype over 5G had a smaller but similar effect. More recently we've seen the hype over US government funding of broadband, especially BEAD, which has already caused chaos in the supplier market, first in oversupply and then the actual BEAD funded projects which have yet to materialize - and may never happen. May you live in interesting times!
