Fiber deployment accelerated in 2024, being marketed to 10.3 million new homes, compared with 9.1 million new homes in 2023, according to data compiled by Michael Render, CEO and principal analyst at RVA LLC. The RVA North American Fiber broadband report projects over $150 billion of public and private spending in the next five years for U.S. residential fiber alone.
“Fiber broadband has been proven to have a superior value proposition, and service providers, private equity funders, and federal and state governments have jumped on board,” said Render. “In addition to home internet, fiber optics supports 5G wireless small cells, fiber to the business, data center growth in the age of AI, and even new networks to support networked quantum computing applications and quantum encryption.”
AT&T has jumped on board the fiber bandwagon. With the demand for high-performance bandwidth expected to grow 80 percent over the next five years, dense fiber networks are the fundamental solution for handling the workloads that will result, John Stankey, president and CEO of AT&T, told the company’s Analyst Day.
“Not only are we going to continue to see increases in the growth of downstream bandwidth, but actually symmetrical bandwidth will become even more important moving forward to the dynamics of user-generated content,” Stankey said. “We’re going to likely see the mix of homework user-generated and office work driving upstream video … and video sensors will be sending data that needs to be processed from everywhere.”
Formerly known only as a wireless mobility company, AT&T changed its course to deploy fiber as the backbone for picking up workloads from multiple access technologies: wireless, fixed and business connections. Stankey is bullish on the growing footprint of fiber.
“My estimation is, by the time you get to 2030, somewhere close to 80 percent of U.S. homes will have a choice of fiber as one of their fixed broadband alternatives,” he said. The other 20 percent may be better served by wireless or satellite, he added.
