Fiber Broadband is finally coming into its own, thanks to the growing number of fiber broadband deployments across the world. However, fiber broadband’s growing popularity is coming at the cost of DSL, one of the more widely deployed broadband technologies.

• According to Infonetics Research, the worldwide Passive Optical Networking (PON) market jumped 20 percent in the first quarter of 2011 over the fourth quarter of the previous year, and is now over $1 billion, an all time high. PON is a technology used to deliver fiber broadband to our homes.
• China, Korea and Japan are the reason why Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON), spending jumped a whopping 46 percent in the first quarter of the year over the previous quarter as Infonetics data shows. EPON is one of most widely deployed fiber broadband technologies with over 40 million subscribers using it as a basis to get super fast broadband.
• During the first three months of 2011, Verizon (s vz) added 207,000 FiOS fiber-to-the-home  subscribers. Verizon is one of the largest fiber broadband providers in the US.
• A double-digit sequential drop in DSL infrastructure spending in all regions led the overall market’s decline led by China shifting its broadband spending to fiber. China, according to Point Topic is the largest broadband country followed by the U.S.

Just to be clear, DSL isn’t going away anytime soon. At the end of 2010, there were 331 million broadband subscribers that used DSL-based connections versus 72 million who used fiber-based broadband connections. So fiber has a lot of catching up to do!