Fiber Broadband Association

UTOPIA Fiber,  America’s largest open access fiber network, built more than 4,387 miles of fiber-optic infrastructure in 2022 throughout Utah, Idaho, and Montana. This impressive feat was accomplished facing fierce headwinds from supply chain constraints and labor market shortages. Additionally, UTOPIA Fiber inked the deal to provide residential services to its 20^th Utah city, while also completing fiber buildouts in 14 cities, including UTOPIA’s 11 original cities.

A new best practice white paper explores micro-trenching, an advantageous fiber broadband deployment method. The report compares micro-trenching amongst other deployment methods as a valuable option in the fiber broadband construction toolkit and it also details the scrutiny that micro-trenching faces, success stories, and best practices.

Many cable companies boast about having more fiber than coax in their outside plant, and according to recent research from Omdia, those numbers are expected to dramatically increase over the next decade. “Forty-three percent of MSOs have already deployed PON in their networks,” said Jaimie Lenderman, Principal Analyst and Research Manager at Omdia covering the Broadband Access Intelligence Service. “It’s split between the largest and smallest providers. Middle-sized organizations are expected to deploy PON in the next 12 to 24 months or longer.” 

More fiber was deployed in 2022 than ever before. Research performed by RVA LLC Market Research & Consulting (RVA) shows that fiber providers passed 7.9 million additional homes in the US in 2022—the highest annual deployment ever, even with challenges in the materials supply chain and labor availability. According to RVA, there are now a total of 68 million fiber broadband passings in the US, up 13% over the past 12 months and up 27% over the past 24 months. Excluding homes with two or more fiber passings, 63 million unique homes have now been passed.

With trained telecommunications workers in short supply and in high demand across the country, investing in workforce development is critical over the next five years. Fortunately, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program provides funding, regulation, and guidance to create and sustain the personnel necessary to build and maintain the nation’s critical infrastructure. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allows the $42.45 billion in BEAD money to be used in workforce and job training.

How fast will the cable industry move to an all-fiber plant? A Credit Suisse financial analyst believes the industry will be slow to upgrade from coax in less competitive areas, not seeing any urgency in upgrading to faster, more reliable technology, with speed and type of upgrades paced by the competition within the markets they serve. “We expect kind of different choices to be made in different [population dense] areas,” said Grant Joslin, Vice President US Telecom Equity Research, Credit Suisse.

We believe the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program provides the best possible chance to bring robust, reliable all-fiber broadband service to the many millions of unserved and underserved locations throughout the country. That said, we understand that National Telecommunications and Information Administration may be considering permitting States and Territories to award grants to applicants using other, less capable transmission technologies where the costs to deploy networks can be extremely high.

For states, broadband mapping is the hot topic in the quest to identify unserved and underserved areas. Collecting accurate, detailed information on who has, and more importantly, who doesn’t have a broadband connection will be essential in securing the maximum amount of Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding. North Carolina and Georgia have been proactive in collecting broadband coverage data and making it available to the public but have taken different approaches on how they have built their maps.