I wrote a recent blog discussing comments from Chris Sambar, AT&T’s EVP of Technology Operations who was quoted as saying that he almost feels sorry for cable companies that compete against AT&T fiber. AT&T is convinced that building fiber is a winning strategy and that the first company that builds fiber in a market will win the majority of broadband customers.

While it’s not yet a giant movement, we do see cable companies that are converting to fiber. One example comes from an announcement by Cox that it will be undertaking a project in the Hampton Roads area to upgrade its networks to 10-gigabit fiber. The build will start this year in Norfolk and will extend over time to the rest of this rapidly-growing area.

Atlantic Broadband recently announced plans to extend fiber to 70,000 passings in New England and West Virginia. This will include the communities of Concord, Dover, Somerset, Durham, and Madbury in New Hampshire and Westover, Morgantown, Granville, and Star City in West Virginia.

Altice recently renewed its pledge to convert all of its 4.4 million customers to fiber. The Chairman of Altice, Patrick Drahi, announced he would convert the company to fiber in 2015 when the company acquired Suddenlink and Cable vision. However, the conversion to fiber slowed and has only covered about one-eighth of the company’s 9.2 million passings. Altice is back in the news with an announcement that it will expand fiber to 1 million new locations in 2022, mostly in the northeast.

We can’t forget Charter, which is planning to build fiber in the suburban and rural areas surrounding its current markets. The company won bids in the RDOF reverse auction for a million rural passings. The company is expected to chase state and federal grants to fill in the pockets won in the RDOF auction.

All of these fiber plans still only represent a relatively small share of the 75.2 million broadband customers served by the eight largest cable companies. But this start of a trend towards fiber raises some interesting questions. It’s hard to tell as someone who works inside the industry, but my sense is that the general public has become convinced that fiber is the superior technology. That perception bodes well for AT&T and anybody that builds fiber to compete against a cable company.

More importantly, a preference for fiber bodes poorly in the long run for any cable company that doesn’t have plans to get faster. Converting to fiber is a tough strategic decision for a cable company to face. Many have been putting their hopes on DOCSIS 4.0 and thought they had plenty of time to make that transition. But the pandemic seems to have moved up the timeline drastically by highlighting the weakness of cable company upload speeds. In the surveys my firm has done in the last two years, we’ve consistently seen 30% of cable customers complaining that they had problems working and schooling from home. That’s a lot of people who are deciding they’d rather have somebody other than the cable companies as an ISP.