Viewpoints
Needs for more broadband are increasing as applications continue to grow and evolve. Gary Bolton, the FBA’s CEO, says fiber has the answer.
By: Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)
Recently, I received a letter from a Washington, D.C. resident requesting my support in getting fiber into his 1908 co-op building in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.
It’s a thriving residence with 26 units and a mixture of households ranging from families with young children to older residents, with plenty of data flowing through the building between work-from-home and hybrid workers, schoolwork in the afternoons, and streaming at night.
Currently, internet is available from two different options, both cable-based to the building and then distributed via an in-building Wi-Fi network. There’s a proposal before the condo board for a contractor to bring fiber into the building at no cost for the initial setup.
The owners of the 26 units would all have to agree for every unit to be made fiber-ready, but it would be up to the individual households to sign up for fiber internet access after that.
Still, no upfront financial cost or service commitment isn’t totally “free.”
The installation crew would require access to every unit and cause some minimal disruption within the building as they pulled fiber through the multi-story building and into each condo. My electronic pen pal wanted to understand the full upside to fiber for the residents, including the services and economic value.
Some building residents believe that it’s not worth the headache, the hardware would be unsightly and that coax internet is “just as good” as fiber – you can imagine my reaction to the last comment.
Why fiber?
Fiber is the most reliable medium available today, far surpassing the performance of coax, both in terms of sheer speed and reliability. It is more than likely residents would have access to symmetrical multi-gig speeds today, a far cry from the patchwork of asymmetrical service offerings delivered by cable today and certainly not coming close to the 5 Gbps symmetrical speeds Verizon offers today.
As for the hardware, I can’t speak to what his particular contractor plans to do, but I can say with certainty that it’s never been easier to deliver fiber to apartments and even individual rooms with today’s technology. Single strand fiber of the type that would be installed into a condo or room is hair-thin, unlike the unsightly, thick coax cable of the last century which requires equally unaesthetic wall plates with jutting knobby connectors.
Today’s in-building fiber can be (and is!) discreetly installed along baseboards and walls by professional installers and even by DIY homeowners when needed. For example, Lightera’s InvisLight home fiber solutions can be purchased straight from Amazon for next day delivery. The single strand 0.6 mm fiber and wall plates are easily glued to the baseboard, so there can be little or no need to cut holes in drywall with the associated mess and noise or having to fish fiber through walls for installation.
It’s a little more delicate work to place the fiber and curve it around corners, but once it is in place, the fiber can be easily painted over when it comes time to put a new color on the walls, assuming you even notice it at all.
What I suggest…
I’m going to suggest to my friend that he arrange a show-and-tell session for the contractor at the next condo meeting to discuss how the work will progress, how the fiber will be deployed both between floors and among units, to answer questions about cutting holes and fishing fiber compared to newer and faster minimal impact pull-and-glue methods, and to bring props to show how fiber is different from legacy coax cabling and has a substantially less intrusive physical footprint.
The new fiber will be substantially more reliable than existing coax cable throughout the building, with its sprawling spaghetti-like set of amplifiers, splitters, and taps that no doubt are as old or older than most of the residents in the building.
More bits and pieces mean more things that eventually get damaged or simply grow old and stop working, resulting in the usual cycle of phone calls to the customer service center, waiting on hold until a representative can talk to you, getting pitched upgrades and new sales offers while you are on hold, another 10 to 15 minutes of troubleshooting that usually results in you unplugging and plugging in the cable modem and router back in at least once or twice, and finally, after all other options have been exhausted, having to arrange a date and time where the cable repairman can come out and hunt down the dead bits or replacement.
Adding fiber adds value
Most importantly, adding fiber adds value to multi-tenant units (MDUs), such as apartments and condominiums in several ways.
Homeowners want and recognize the need for multiple broadband choices, rather than being locked into a single broadband vendor or technology type. We know from the work of companies such as Internet Subway – that are building fiber into existing and greenfield MDU complexes -that higher quality broadband service delivers increased revenue per unit for renters and higher property value to owners, especially as high-earning households choose residences with elevated amenities.
According to Fiber Broadband Association 2023 research, fiber added 3.2% to the value of a condo, while a rental unit would be valued at 12.8% higher with fiber.
RVA Market Research & Consulting consumer data for 2025 shows that fiber to the home is perceived as the best broadband solution by 58% of respondents, as compared to only 20% for cable. Fiber’s Net Promotor Score (NPS), a combination of customer loyalty, experience, and recommendation metrics, is the highest in the broadband industry, far exceeding all other broadband types.
What the future holds…
Internet Subway President and CEO Adam Bell notes that offering faster broadband speeds are a part of the competitive landscape today, with many MDUs topping out at 1 Gbps packages.
“Drive down a highway in America and open your eyes to the 2 gig, 5 gig [service] billboards that all the major ISPs are advertising,” Bell told Fiber Forward magazine this summer. “One gig [service availability] is not going to be worth the same amount of money in 2028, not with all the other providers pushing multi-gig. What does that mean for property owners? Owners like the fact that fiber delivers a better experience that’s upgradable and doesn’t break the bank.”
Internet Subway’s business model is a little bit different than my friend’s situation with the condo board. The service provider operates as a white label provider across multiple properties in the southeast with an ongoing expansion into Chicago, working with MDUs and developers to provide a zero-touch solution for property managers.
A renter can simply move in and be handed an initial login to get service through a building’s high-speed Wi-Fi, adjusting the service plan through the website and getting billed as a value-add, on top of baseline rent payment.
And the need for more broadband is steadily increasing as applications continue to grow and evolve. Over the last eight years, average and median monthly data consumption for households has steadily gone up year-over-year. Median total data per subscriber usage in 2018 was at around 120 GB and rose to 431 GB by 2025, while average total usage has grown from 231 GB per month in 2018 to 664 GB in 2025, according to OpenVault Broadband Insights statistics.
Fiber is the only technology with a clear and clean path for the needs of today and tomorrow.
Today’s GPON and XGS-PON customers are being upgraded to 25G PON and 50G PON speeds through a simple replacement of electronics at the customer and head-end. Speeding up cable plant is fraught with adding more splitters and amps, each incremental speed bump adding more powered parts to an already aging infrastructure.
The innumerable benefits of fiber
Faster fiber speeds deliver significant benefits to home productivity. Slower connectivity means less work getting done as people wait for services to start and files to download, especially as applications continue to consume more bandwidth. A typical user with a 100 Mbps broadband connection had to wait around 5 minutes a day in 2018.
By 2024, that user was waiting more than 15 minutes a day, costing them more than 1.25 hours of productive time per week, adding up to more than two days of lost productivity in a typical work year. In comparison, users with 1 Gbps and faster connections essentially lost no more than a minute or two per week waiting.
Regardless of who is building the fiber to the unit and providing the broadband service, there are two key takeaways. Building fiber into an existing MDU can be minimally disruptive and aesthetically impactful due to a combination of the physical footprint of a single strand of fiber and easy-to-install techniques that don’t require specialized technicians for most of the construction.
Secondly, adding fiber to an existing MDU, be it a rental property or condo, increases the real estate value of the unit, with significant benefits for MDU building owners that provide fiber broadband as a value-added service to renters. Fiber makes it a more competitive property with upscale amenities and increases the average revenue per unit through the uptake of a high-speed broadband plan at minimal overhead for the managers.
I’m optimistic that my friend will be able to take this information back to the rest of the condo owners and be able to assure everyone that a small investment in time and disruption today will result in cash dividends when they go to sell their units in the future.
