Fiber availability for large- and mid-sized commercial buildings jumped to 54.8 percent in the U.S. in 2017, according to a new report about business fiber availability from Vertical Systems Group
As a result of this growth, the U.S. Fiber Gap has dropped to less than fifty percent (45.2%) for the first time, the research firm said. This annual benchmark quantifies the scope of fiber lit buildings in the U.S. with twenty or more employees. Encompassing more than two million individual business establishments, this base of commercial buildings maps directly to the addressable market for higher speed Carrier Ethernet, Cloud, Data Center, Hybrid VPN and emerging SDN-enabled services.
Business Fiber Availability
For this analysis, a fiber lit building is defined as a commercial site or data center that has on-net optical fiber connectivity to a network provider’s infrastructure, plus active service termination equipment onsite. Excluded from this analysis are standalone cell towers, small cells not located in fiber lit buildings, near net buildings, buildings classified as coiled at curb or coiled in building, HFC-connected buildings, carrier central offices, residential buildings, and private or dark fiber installations.
“More commercial U.S. buildings were newly lit with fiber during 2017 than in any other year since we initiated this research in 2004. The number of net new fiber lit buildings increased across every building size segment, and most substantially for medium size sites,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group, in a prepared statement.“Deployments will continue to accelerate because fiber is both a strategic asset for delivery of wireline business services, as well as a necessity for enabling 5G.”
Image courtesy of flickr user Matthew Wilson.
