5.8 Million North American Homes Now Have Fiber

As of March of this year, North America boasts approximately 18.2 million homes passed with fiber to the home (FTTH) connections, this according to a new study commissioned by the Fiber to the Home Council.

“Homes passed,” is a confusing term, however, that doesn’t always mean that service is available. As a result, the study found that all-fiber networks are now available for 17 million or 16% of homes in North America, with 5.8 million homes actually subscribing to television, high-speed Internet and/or phone service over these networks.

A large portion of the FTTH deployment thus far has been due to Verizon’s $23 billion dollar investment in overbuilding its wireline service in many areas. In fact, Verizon boasted 4.3 million of the 5.8 million homes connected as of March 30, 2010.

But the study identified another 750 other providers of FTTH in North America which represents over 1.4 million total connections, with most of those being small, independent telephone companies that are replacing their copper lines with end-to-end fiber in order to ensure their future competitiveness as broadband providers.

Further, the FTTH Council reports that more than 65% of small, independent telephone companies that have not upgraded to FTTH said they would very likely do so in the future, with another 11% saying they were somewhat likely. More than 85% of those that have already deployed FTTH said they would be adding more direct fiber connections going forward.

“With Verizon approaching the end of its initial FiOS expansion, we are seeing a lot of small local exchange carriers in the U.S. who are ready to pick up the slack, along with some cable TV companies deploying RFoG and some larger Canadian companies going FTTH,” said Joe Savage, President of the FTTH Council, non-profit organization of more than 200 companies and organizations dedicated to expanding the deployment of all-fiber, next-generation networks.

“To continue to meet the rapidly growing bandwidth requirements for emerging applications and services, these companies know that they have to ‘future-proof’ their networks by running fiber all the way to the premises – and that’s why we are seeing all this activity,” he added

Download the April 2010 FTTH Council survey report commissioned by RVA LLC: ”Fiber-to-the-Home: North American Market Update.”

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