Fiber deployments to homes in the United States grew 13 percent in 2015, says the FTTH Council as more incumbent telcos like AT&T (NYSE: T) and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and insurgent providers like Google Fiber (NASDAQ: GOOG) step up their FTTH deployment plans.
The new findings, which were gathered through the association's partnership with research partner RVA, found that the acceleration of U.S. FTTH deployment that began in 2011 continued into 2015.
Nearly 3 million new homes were passed with fiber in the U.S. this year, bringing the total to 26 million homes.
Overall, the North American market continues to ramp with nearly 34 million homes passed in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean and marketed with fiber. Driven by aggressive deployments by Bell Canada and Telus, Canada's growth has been accelerating with 2.4 million homes marketed.
Although FTTH service is hardly ubiquitous, the U.S. has 12.3 million homes connected with FTTH. What this translates into is a 50 percent take rate, and almost 20 percent of all true FTTH connections are now in the U.S.
For those service providers that have been accelerating their FTTH builds, a key focus has been on providing a 1 Gbps speed tier.
Even though the majority of consumers won't use anywhere near a 1 Gbps speed, U.S. and Canadian service providers like Bell Canada continue to roll out 1 Gbps service. RVA said that half of the over 1,000 FTTH providers in North America expect to be offering a Gigabit service within 5 years.
Regardless if it's a 1 Gbps or a 50 or 100 Mbps speed tier, customers who purchase FTTH services that participated in the survey reported "over 50% higher satisfaction with fiber than with DSL or cable."
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Source: FTTH Council |
For more:
- see the release
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