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They sneeze, and we catch a cold. The latest germ of an idea that proves this old adage about transatlantic trends is the creation of Gigabit Cities. 2014 was a pivotal year for gigabit broadband in North America, with the US alone already boasting more than 80 such bastions of bandwidth. The signs are that 2015 could be the year when Europe catches up.

As ever, places like Amsterdam and Stockholm lead the way, but the UK is certainly seeing a raft of activity around ultra-fast internet connections. With a competitive market driven by a host of major operators and innovative new entrants alike, we may be witnessing the first tentative steps towards widely available gigabit broadband at some of the most aggressively priced rates in Europe.

If the evolution of broadband services in the last 15 to 20 years has proved anything, it's that progress is entirely dependent on economics. The demand is there, but that demand is price sensitive. The challenge is how to sustainably build and grow the networks and service delivery capabilities that make gigabit broadband become a reality.

Enterprise customers have always been expensive to provision and these are costs that residential customers end up (indirectly) picking up. When a new subscriber comes on stream or needs changes to their service levels, the operator's back office systems grind into action, controlling network elements such as DSLAMs, FTTH aggregation platforms and CMTSs. This is an opportunity for operators with foresight because they can engineer software-defined networking (SDN) principles into their provisioning architectures.

Clever use of software APIs result in automated service delivery that strips away a whole layer of admin, reducing delays, errors and costs. What the enterprise customer experiences is a web portal-based menu of service options with a direct interface to the nuts and bolts of the network. It's easy to use, more reliable, and injects extra margin for the operator to provide a lower cost service.

The projections for bandwidth demand are eye-watering. The Cisco Visual Networking Index initiative puts global IP traffic at more than 1ZB (one trillion gigabytes) a year by the end of 2016, and it's expected to double by the end of 2019. By then video will comprise 80 per cent of all IP traffic. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will be crossing the network.

Automated provisioning can help control the cost model. It can offer a more flexible and modular approach to steadily scaling out network infrastructure in line with bandwidth demand, and this is vital to avoiding sudden shocks to the operator's investment model and also subscriber impact through price hikes or slower network rollout. To give enterprise customers the experience they need, operators are assessing intelligent new approaches to their physical fibre plant, both in the access and transport networks.

Installing new fibre optic cable can be costly, especially in densely populated areas. Technologies such as Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) allow operators to layer multiple services on top of each other on the same fibre, increasing the capacity of the transport network. In the access network, new FTTH technologies such as NG-PON2 provide scalability by using Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (TWDM). This allows service providers to deploy a single 10-gigabit access network and add additional networks on other wavelengths as demand increases, or for businesses who want point-to-point connectivity.

By incorporating both DWDM and NG-PON2, operators can reduce costs by consolidating residential and business service delivery networks onto the same fibre without fear of degrading SLA performance. The result is an agile, high-capacity, all-Ethernet service delivery network to quench gigabit broadband thirst for decades to come.