Increased penetration of the internet is the major driver for fiber optic cables market. As a result, market growth is predicted to be fueled by increasing penetration of 5G, IoT, IT enterprises, and increasing applications within medical and aerospace and military industry, as well as submarine cables, but these drivers are restricted by certain limitations.
What Awaits the Fiber Optic Cable Market?
Trade tensions due to geopolitical issues like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and rising interest rates are some of the challenges ahead. Supply chains, become susceptible to shortages of raw materials, labour, and logistic challenges.
A worldwide shortage of fiber optic cable has driven up prices and increased lead-times. Covid-19 also had a negative impact on the optical fiber cable market, but it has started to regain its pace. Owing to the lockdown imposed by most countries across the globe, manufacturing industries are enforced to shut down their units.
This has affected production and demand for fiber optic components which in turn affected supply chain pathways from primary contractors, installation contractors, and system integrators.
Main Challenges for the Market
Challenges to Fiber Optic Cable Development are price, lifetime, capacity, and maintenance.
Overcapacity of optical preforms, leads to strong price competition, coupled with the price of raw materials rising, putting fiber optics cable manufacturers in a challenging situation, including the lack of different materials for manufacturing processes, ranging from depreciation of local currencies against the dollar, higher freight costs and strike action due to social tension. When raw material supply chains get back on track, this should see pressures on fiber optic cables ease.
In all key market segments, be they by cable type, by application, by end user or by region, any disruption along this chain will inevitably cause knock on effects to every market segment.
How can the Fiber Optic Cable Market Surpass this?
The advance of fiber optic manufacturing technology, the research and development of new fiber optic products, and new intelligent production can alleviate the challenges facing the development of fiber optic cables to a certain extent:
The future will continue to bring the growing need for reliability, high speed scalable communication networks, but the cost incurred while implementing this is very high, therefore most companies will have to overcome complex laws that are still prohibiting countries from expanding.
The cable industry is currently in a slow recovery mode, and there’s possibilities of mergers and acquisitions throughout the industry, consolidating manufacturers into a more competitive strategy.
Overall, the market’s ongoing expansion of the industry has provided today’s businesses with advantages that are critical for them to understand. It’s fundamental for a telco business to closely follow the trends of the movements in the market to gain competitive edge.
It’s great to know that there will be more reliability and faster speed in the future regarding fiber optic internet connection. I can imagine how this can be a huge help for companies now that more transactions are done online. If they get a business fiber optic internet access connection, they will be sure that they can cater to their customers as soon as possible and also communicate with them all the time.