While we can read daily on wireless technologies either about the 3G folks or 4G (WiMAX e.g.), fiber technologies are being deployed more and more, seemingly almost by stealth.

Reason is that fiber technology has become so cost competitive that only in cases where there is already copper deployed it might still make sense to upgrade with copper. Otherwise, in particualr for new installations it is more cost efficient to fully go to fiber. Not surprisingly, this math is true for greenfield places and similarly for developing countries. As the article in the International Herald Tribune shows, places like The Cayman Islands, Bangladesh go fiber all the way to residences. The bottleneck, traditionally on the access network side, is suddenly the backbone connection to the Internet. It is clear that with these access network upgrades the backbone networks will soon become challenged with entirely new traffic demands.
This will inevitably lead to upgrades there, too, and new fiber technologies in the 40Gbps range will have to be deployed to meet those requirements cost efficiently. Good things that are finally seeing the light of day, after being talked about and delayed now for 5 years...