Fibre towards the new phase: networks beyond 10 Giga, AI and the connected home

Networks beyond 10 Gigabits governed by artificial intelligence, customer experience played out room by room and routers transformed into home service hubs thanks to Wi-Fi sensing. Fibre is entering a new phase of industrial maturity. At the Ftth Conference 2026 in London, the industry focused on a paradigm shift: the network no longer just as access infrastructure, but as an enabling platform for multigigabit performance, intelligent management and value-added services. A shift that reshapes operators' priorities, shifting the centre of gravity from coverage and rated speed to quality of experience and monetisation.

Fibre has always been recounted in the same way as great works are recounted: kilometres laid, building units covered, building sites, civic buildings reached. Necessary, certainly. But with an implication: that the value was almost all there, in having laid a better infrastructure than copper. It is the language now that has changed. Fibre is no longer seen merely as the road on which data runs. It is becoming a platform that promises - precisely - multigigabit performance, predictive maintenance, perceived quality inside the home and new services to read, without cameras, what is happening inside the home.

To simplify, three major innovations emerged from the London conference of fibre operators. The first concerns technological evolution. But it is not only the chase for speed with the industry now looking beyond 10 Gigabit and pushing towards 10 to 50 Gigabit trajectories. The real discontinuity is the entry of artificial intelligence into network management. Telemetry, continuous analytics, signal quality, interference, device behaviour, traffic anomalies: everything contributes to building a network that no longer waits for failure to occur, but attempts to predict it. This is the logic of proactive network care.

The second guideline concerns the customer experience, which becomes the real competitive terrain. The focus shifts to two elements: simplification and speed of activation, on the one hand, and quality of connection within the home, on the other. The challenge is no longer just to bring fibre to the building, but to ensure uniform performance in every home. In this context, integrated solutions are emerging that combine wired architectures, such as Fibre to the Room (Fttr), with advanced Wi-Fi ecosystems, starting with Wi-Fi 7 and already looking ahead to Wi-Fi 8.

Finally, the third guideline opens up the front of new services. Wi-Fi sensing allows signal variations to be used to detect presence, movement and activity, effectively turning the router into an intelligent home hub. Applications range from security and health to energy efficiency: intrusion detection, fall detection for elderly care, sleep analysis and consumption optimisation. The industrial relevance is twofold: on the one hand it does not require new devices, on the other hand it enables scalable service models and new revenue sources for operators.