Small Telecom Providers Lead Continued Expansion of All-Fiber Networks

The number of North American households connected directly into fiber networks has hit the 9 million mark, with small incumbent telephone companies continuing to lead the growth in fiber to the home deployments, according to the Fiber-to-the-Home Council Americas.

FTTH services are now available to 21.3 million North American homes, an increase of more than 10 percent over the past six months. RVA found that all but eight of nearly 880 FTTH service providers surveyed have fewer than 30,000 subscribers, with only five having more than 50,000 access lines and 97 percent of them having fewer than 10,000. The most notable of the big FTTH providers is Verizon, which serves more than half of the FTTH households in North America. RVA found that there are now more than a half million households on the continent receiving Internet connectivity at or in excess of 100 megabits per second (mbps), and that tested throughput speeds among survey respondents found FTTH subscribers beginning to pull away from other access technologies in both download and upload capacity. Median tested download speeds were above 20 mbps for FTTH subscribers, compared to less than 15 mbps for cable modem users, while FTTH upload speeds were over 9 mbps compared to about 3 mbps for cable.