The Fiber Broadband Association announced the results of a fiber deployment survey from RVA LLC Market Research & Consulting. That firm has been tracking the deployment of fiber across the U.S. for many years. The survey was for the year ending in September 2024.
The survey reports the following:
- ISPs built fiber to pass 10.3 million homes in the last year, a new all-time high. That includes 8.4 million new passings that got fiber and 1.9 million passings that got an additional fiber connection.
- RVA estimates that fiber now passes 56.5% of U.S. homes.
- Fiber ISPs are increasing penetration rates on fiber over time, with an overall take rate of 45%. ISPs are achieving a 20% penetration more quickly than in the past.
- RVA claims that cable company penetration rates in fiber neighborhoods have fallen by 33%, with the other new fiber passings coming from customers that previously had DSL or other technologies.
The remaining fiber market is still immense, with almost 149 million homes that don’t have fiber. RVA estimates this at:
- Densely populated mid to high-income areas – 90.6 million.
- Densely populated low-income areas – 21.5 million.
- Small towns / rural – 29.2 million.
- Second homes – 7.3 million.
The following graph from RVA that shows fiber construction over time is interesting.
The early fiber growth from 2005 – 2008 mostly came from Verizon FiOS. No other large ISPs climbed on the fiber wagon for many years. The fall-off of fiber construction during the pandemic is dramatic, with over 3 million fewer new homes being passed with fiber in 2020.
There are a lot of different entities building fiber. The biggest market share is held buy the large telcos and their affiliates (63.8%). Next comes smaller tier 2 and 3 telcos (11.6%), fiber overbuilders (10.2%), cable companies (9.3%), municipalities (2.7%), and electric cooperatives (2.4%).
Out of the 149 million homes without fiber, I’d be interested to know how many of those homes are served by a T1 Operator (Comcast – Charter specifically). Removing those out of the conversation would really show the pace of deployment in the T2 T3 space where the action is happening. The T1 are handcuffed some by their installed HFC base they have so they are looking at DOCSIS4.0 etc. You look past them, the story of DOCSIS gets much more muddled.
This was estimated in 2022 to be 83.9% of Americans are on a cable internet service. In theory, most of the new federally funded fiber builds shouldn’t have overbuilt the vast majority of those cable plants so that number probably hasn’t moved much.
I’m interested on what you call a ‘T1,2,3 operator’.
Also note that MOST of these fiber builds are GPON. Look at the shipment volumes of GPON vs XGSPON gear, look at various polling. GPON is a peer to DOCSIS3.1, it’s not superior tech though could be deployed in more syncronous packages (cablecos are notorious about keeping uploads low).