July 2019, Fiber-to-the-home leaders and innovators for 2019 – “Building a Fiber-Connected World” is the tagline of Broadband Communities magazine, and each year the FTTH Top 100 list recognizes organizations that lead the way in this arena.
Fiber-to-the-home deployment in the United States is beginning to outpace legacy copper broadband, a trend that is impacting service providers and their vendor suppliers.
Fiber-based broadband services, according to an RVA study commissioned by the Fiber Broadband Association, surpassed DSL in 2018 as the second-most common type of home internet connection in North America, following cable. According to the research firm, fiber now passes 39 million homes in the United States (1.6 million of them have multiple fiber passings) and connects 18.6 million homes, up 17 percent over 2017. A large portion – 71 percent – of fiber-to-the-home builds are by large incumbents. The remaining 29 percent are from Tier 2 and 3 providers, including a mix of independent telcos, municipalities, competitive providers and electric cooperatives.
Vendors are also seeing a transition in the equipment they sell. For example, Broadband Trends reported that global DSL port shipments declined 22 percent year-over-year to reach 35.7 million in 2018 as service providers shift their focus to FTTH.
Gigabit service – and beyond – continues to drive the deployment of fiber. Large and small providers alike are not only offering 1 Gbps services but also eyeing a path to 10 Gbps via either XGS-PON or NG-PON2.
It’s no wonder the industry is expanding and the number of companies competing for the Top 100 slots continues to grow. That’s great for the country, even if it makes life difficult for the editors who assemble this list.
The 2019 FTTH Top 100 list represents the whole fiber-to-the-home ecosystem. Optical fiber and fiber cables; passive equipment for connecting, protecting and managing fiber; and active equipment for sending and receiving signals over fiber are the most basic components of an FTTH network, along with software for planning, setting up and managing networks and for provisioning and billing fiber services. The list contains many companies that design, manufacture and distribute these essential products.
To put these pieces together requires firms that finance, plan, design, engineer, construct and install fiber optic networks, as well as those that make equipment for digging, pushing, pulling and attaching fiber. These, too, are represented on the list. Also included are a variety of organizations that advocate for better broadband or create conditions that make FTTH more profitable.
Finally, there wouldn’t be any fiber to the home if not for the deployers – large and small, private and public, incumbent and competitive – that invest in FTTH networks.
Companies newly added or reinstated to the list represent a variety of ecosystem niches. These niches are quite diverse. Three of the new entrants – Consolidated, GVTC and Lumos Networks – are incumbent telcos that are aggressively expanding 1 Gbps FTTH services in diverse rural towns and cities. Consolidated is rapidly expanding 1 Gbps FTTH service throughout the former FairPoint territory, and GVTC and Lumos are encouraging economic development with new fiber builds. Another notable trend is the growing presence of electric cooperatives and competitive providers. Co-Mo Connect is an electric cooperative that was funded without grants and now offers 1 Gbps services to its electric customers, GoNetspeed lures customers with fixed broadband pricing, and Synergy offers managed services to MDUs.
Joining the network operators is a host of companies that provide construction, financing, network planning and powering. Last Mile Communications provides telcos and cable companies with a variety of consulting and capital funding services, and Neighborly connects underserved communities with capital for fiber broadband networks. ESPi offers a series of uninterrupted power supply batteries that provide protection against input power interruptions for FTTH providers. Foresite Group provides broadband engineering and related services. Render is gaining ground with rural providers with its suite of geospatial network deployment solutions to help providers build large-scale projects faster and cheaper, Geograph provides tools for network planning and design, and Tesmec USA provides open-trench solutions for fiber deployments.
SELECTION CRITERIA
In selecting the FTTH Top 100, the editors looked for organizations that advance the cause of fiber-based broadband by
Deploying networks that are large or ambitious, have innovative business plans or are intended to transform local economies or improve communities’ quality of life
Supplying key hardware, software or services to deployers
Introducing innovative technologies with game-changing potential, even if they have not yet been commercially deployed
Providing key conditions for fiber builds, such as early-stage support or demand aggregation.
To be listed among the FTTH Top 100, an organization may be based anywhere in the world but must do business in North America. Except for broadband service providers, which are inherently local, we give preference to organizations that serve national rather than local markets. Overall size is unimportant, as is corporate form – in addition to for-profit companies, the list includes municipalities, a telephone cooperative, an electric cooperative and a nonprofit research organization.
Although some organizations on the list focus entirely on fiber to the premises or other fiber-based broadband technologies, most deliver or support a mix of broadband technologies. For some, broadband represents only a small part of their business. In making these selections, the editors considered how important the organizations are to advancing fiber broadband rather than how important broadband is to them.
