There's good news and bad news about the U.S. fiber growth -- On the good news side, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) installations have grown 83 percent since last October and fiber now reaches 398 communities in 43 states, according to research released by the Fiber Optic Communities in the United States (FOCUS). On the bad news side, the U.S. is badly lagging the rest of the world in fiber deployment and is, in fact, losing ground. '"There are roughly 213,000 premises wired with fiber today out of 100-some million. It's not a very big percentage," said Max Kipfer, FOCUS' founder and president. "As a country we dropped to 16th in the world in fiber deployments." Europe has over a half million and Japan has 1.2 million fiber-connected premises. Ninety percent of Danish residents have access to 10 megs of data or better and pay only 30 Euros a month for it, he said. "We're a long way away and we're dropping fast," he said. Kipfer blamed several factors for the nation's slow fiber deployments.
The growing need for real-time, localized artificial intelligence (AI) processing power drives demand for Generative AI (GenAI) solutions on public cloud edge computing platforms. Worldwide spending on edge computing is forecast to reach $232 billion in 2024 -- that's an increase of 15.4 percent over 2023, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Combined enterprise and service provider spending across hardware, software, professional services, and provisioned services for edge solutions will sustain strong growth through 2027 when spending is forecast to reach nearly $350 billion. Edge Computing Market Development IDC defines edge as the information and communications technology (ICT) related actions performed outside of the centralized data center, where edge computing is the intermediary between the connected endpoints and the core enterprise IT environment. Characteristically, edge computing is distributed, software-defined, and flexible. T