Tag Archives: Fiber Broadband Association

Rising Costs of Broadband Construction

The Fiber Broadband Association, along with its consultant, Cartesian, published its annual report on the cost of fiber deployment. The report was compiled from online surveys and phone interviews conducted in September and October 2025.

The report includes a lot of interesting statistics and trends for anybody getting ready to build fiber.

  • FBA believes that 60% of the homes in the country are now passed with fiber. There were 11.8 million fiber passings built in 2025, including 8.1 million to new locations.
  • The median price of fiber construction that was garnered from the survey was $18.00 per foot for buried construction and $8.00 per foot for aerial construction. That was a 3% increase in cost for buried construction and a 14% increase for aerial construction.
  • Labor is still the largest component of cost. Labor represented 72% of the cost of buried construction and 64% of the cost of buried construction.
  • The method of underground construction matters. It cost 40% less to directly bury fiber compared to the cost of putting fiber into new conduit. Trenching had the highest cost, at 60% more than plowing and 6% more than directional boring.
  • 92% of survey respondents saw higher costs for fiber construction in 2025 compared to 2024.

The most relevant news from the report is that 88% of the respondents expect a cost increase for construction in 2026. 62% of respondents expect a ‘slight’ cost increase of less than 10%. 26% expect a cost increase of more than 10%. 9% expect costs to stay the same, and 3% expect costs to decrease by less than 10%.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said they expect fiber deployment costs to rise “slightly” (less than 10%) compared to 26% who expect a “significant” increase of 10% or more. About 9% expect costs to stay the same, and 3% expect costs to decrease by 10% or less. Considering all responses, 88% of respondents expect costs to increase again in 2026.

Note that the cost increases experienced in 2025 and the expected increases expected for 2026 are national averages. Responses to the survey came from 38 different states, and there was a fairly even split between urban, suburban, and rural fiber builders. National averages blur the significant differences in the cost of labor in different parts of the country. National averages also even out the differences between the big fiber builders who build huge numbers of miles of fibers, and smaller ISPs building smaller projects. The labor costs in a national survey also include projects built with prevailing wages, projects built at union wages, and projects built at market non-union wages. The averages also blend the costs from ISPs that build with employees versus those using contractors.

I have to wonder if all of the folks who plan to build fiber with BEAD grants have built in a possible cost increase for fiber construction of 10% per year. That would mean that fiber built in the fourth year might be 33% more expensive than what was built in the first year.

The report is well worth reading for anybody planning to build fiber because it’s full of interesting statistics. For example, an interesting statistic is that a buried construction crew of 3 can build around 1,000 feet per day, while a crew of 7 can build 1,585 feet per day. A crew of 3 can build 1,800 feet of aerial fiber per day, while a crew of 6 can build 4,000 feet per day. These statistics show there isn’t a big benefit from using large crews compared to using multiple smaller crews.

Another interesting statistic was drop costs. The average cost for a buried drop under 100 feet was $556, while the cost for a 500+ foot drop was $675. The average cost for an aerial drop under 100 feet was $338, while the cost for a 500+ foot drop was $400. These numbers also blend the cost of ISPs that build drops using in-house staff versus those using all contract labor.

Fiber and Public Safety

The Fiber Broadband Association released a paper Fiber for Public Safety: Fighting Fire with Fiber – How Broadband Infrastructure Protects Communities Before, During, and After Disasters. The paper provides some case studies that show how fiber infrastructure is supporting communities.

The report includes five case studies of real-world examples of how fiber broadband has proven make a difference for public safety and during disasters.

  • In California, Siskiyou Telephone restored communications to a fire camp within an hour after satellite broadband collapsed under the heavy demand from first responders.
  • In Hawaii, the hardened and buried fiber networks of Hawaiian Telecom kept working during the 2023 Maui wildfires while the rest of the island’s telecommunication grids went down.
  • In Oregon, Douglas Fast Net pre-positioned fiber at fire camp sites to make sure that broadband is available when emergencies hit.
  • In Tennessee, United Communications provides free fiber broadband to every fire and police station it serves and makes public safety a central mission of its fiber network.
  • In Georgia, PeachNet connects first responders and emergency agencies directly to fiber to strengthen readiness while also supporting community services.

Most folks in the industry can tell stories about the importance and resilience of fiber networks and disasters. Here are a few of my own:

  • In the aftermath of a bad summer thunderstorm near Laurel, Maryland, I saw where the storm had knocked down a tree that broke the electric, telephone copper, and cable company wires. Amazingly, the Verizon FiOS fiber did not break and was holding up to the full weight of the tree. The broadband was still working in the neighborhoods fed by that fiber. I wish I had a smartphone camera in those days.
  • The electric utility in Lafayette, Louisiana, built a fiber backbone around the City and connected fiber to electric substations, the University, and public anchor institutions. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the LUS Fiber was the only functioning communications network in the City.
  • When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville and surrounding counties, all communications went down as entire roads were wiped off the map, which crippled networks by destroying the fiber backbones that supported broadband, cellular, and telephone networks. However, the fiber network from Duke Power kept operating since the company had recently built a redundant fiber path into the area along a route that didn’t get destroyed. Having this operating fiber backbone sped up the restoration of the power grid by weeks since at allowed Duke repair crews to communicate with the outside world.

The whitepaper points out that fiber networks can play a huge role in public safety when built correctly. Burying fiber, like in Maui, made a huge difference. Building redundant routes can guarantee connectivity when other networks fail.

Small Fiber Builders Making an Impact

The research firm RVA, LLC conducted a study for the Fiber Broadband Association looking at the number of homes and businesses that are now passed and/or served with fiber. The numbers show that smaller fiber providers are collectively having a big impact on the industry.

RVA found that as of September 2018 there were 18.4 million homes with fiber, up from 15 million a year earlier. To put that into perspective, at the end of 2017 there was just over 126 million US households, meaning that fiber has now made it into over 14% of US homes. What’s most impressive, though, about that finding is that 2.7% of homes got fiber in that one-year period. The number of fiber households has been creeping up slowly over the decade, but the speed of deployment is accelerating.

RVA also looked at passings and says that 39.2 million or 31% of homes are now passed with fiber. Comparing the 18.4 million fiber customers to the 39.2 million passings shows a fiber penetration rate of 47%. RVA also says that there are 1.6 million homes that are passed by two fiber providers – no doubt in the markets like Kansas City, Austin and the Research Triangle in North Carolina where Google and the incumbents both built fiber. RVA shows that when accounting for homes that have no broadband that fiber networks are achieving a 60% penetration rate.

Small fiber providers are collectively having a big impact on the industry. RVA says there are over 1,000 smaller fiber providers in the country. They quantify the overall market share of these providers as follows: smaller telcos (10.3%), fiber overbuilders (6.4%), cable companies (5.5%), municipalities (3.7%), real estate development integrators (1.1%) and electric cooperatives (0.5%).

In 2018 the small providers built to 29% of the new homes passed with the rest built by four Tier one providers. RVA didn’t identify these big providers, but clearly the biggest fiber builder right now is AT&T. The company has built fiber to over 10 million passings in the past four years and says they will reach about 14 million passings by mid-2019. A lot of the AT&T fiber passings come from an aggressive plan to build to MDUs (apartments and condominium complexes). However, the company is also making fiber available to homes within close range of its numerous existing neighborhood fiber POPs that are near to existing larger AT&T fiber customers.

The other biggest fiber builder right now is Altice. They announced a little over a year ago that they are planning to build fiber across their footprints from the Cable Vision and Suddenlink acquisitions – nearly 8 million passings. The company seems to be fulfilling that promise with a flurry of press releases in 2018 talking about active fiber deployments. Altice is currently trying to sell off some of its European fiber networks to lighten debt load and assumedly raise the cash needed to complete the US fiber build.

Most other large providers have more modest fiber plans. We know that the CenturyLink fiber expansion that was hot news just two years ago is likely now dead. Verizon is now putting its effort into fixed 5G wireless. The big cable companies all build fiber in new subdivisions but have all committed to DOCSIS 3.1 on their existing cable networks.

Looking forward a few years and most of the new fiber is likely to come from smaller providers. AT&T hasn’t announced any plans past the 2019 schedule and by then will have effectively passed all of the low-hanging fruit within range of its existing fiber network. Altice says it will take until at least 2022 to finish its fiber construction. There are no other big companies with announced plans to build fiber.

All of this is good news for the US households lucky enough to get fiber. It’s always been industry wisdom that the industry wouldn’t develop gigabit applications until there are enough fiber households to make it economically viable. While most customers on fiber probably are subscribing to speeds less than a gigabit, there ought to finally be enough gigabit fiber customers nationwide to create a gigabit market.