Viewpoints
There are 84.6 million unique addresses that have fiber but there’s still plenty of upward growth in the years ahead, writes FBA President and CEO Gary Bolton.
By: Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association
In 2025, the fiber industry set another record for growth, hitting 11.8 million homes passed according to the latest FBA research conducted by RVA Market Research & Consulting. Total broadband passings have reached nearly 100 million homes in the United States when you include homes with more than one passing. Taking out the multiple-passings, there are 84.6 million unique addresses that have fiber.
But there’s still plenty of upward growth in the years ahead. Consider that NTIA BEAD funding, created to connect the unserved and underserved across the nation, just started to be released in the last quarter of 2025. Fiber is the necessary and vital infrastructure for households, communities, and businesses for decades to come, so there’s plenty of greenfield construction that will take place over the next three years as federal funding with local, state, and private contributions starts closing the digital divide.
What the research shows
RVA’s research shows that the number of homes getting second or third passings with fiber has continued to steadily grow over the past decade, from an initial 1.5% in 2015 to today’s 16.1% this year. It’s a safe bet that second and third passing numbers will continue to grow, driven by competition between incumbent providers and third-party entrants in nearly all markets and the cable industry’s eventual embrace of fiber for numerous reasons.
With the exception of the two cable providers with the largest HFC installed base, broadband operators see fiber as being the best long-term choice for growth, putting them on a competitive footing with telco and third-party offerings, drastically simplifying their network when compared to DOCSIS 4.0 and farther-out upgrades, and reducing operational costs due to increased reliability and lower power consumption.
The power of fiber for any operator is demonstrated by its steadily increasing take rates compared to other technologies. Based on unique passings, fiber-to-the-home has a 40% average take rate, including multiple fiber providers in a market, and a 46.5% average take rate based on unique passings according to the latest RVA data. With two fiber providers in a community, the cumulative fiber take rate goes up to 61%.
Nationwide, fiber now passes over 60% of U.S. households, well on the way to the Fiber Broadband Association’s (FBA) goal to pass 90% of the nation with fiber by the end of the decade. There are still nearly 60 million first-passing U.S. broadband serviceable locations (BSLs) left to address.
Service providers see the benefits of being the “first to fiber” based on take rates, high NPS scores, and consumer perception that fiber is the gold standard for broadband. Service providers have indicated that they will take advantage of changes in the tax law that advance bonus depreciation to 100% starting in 2026 to accelerate fiber deployments. RVA and other analysts expect increased FTTH capital expenditures from between 5% to 15% in the near-term using free cash flow due to the changes. For example, AT&T announced in July it plans to accelerate fiber deployment to an additional 1 million locations annually in 2026. Verizon expects to see up to $2 billion in tax savings this year, monies that it will put into network and fiber expansion.
What we can expect
But we also expect additional adoption of fiber over time, both in terms of construction and take rates. As noted earlier, the cable industry as a whole is on a path to migrate to fiber for competitive, cost, and reliability reasons and will likely accelerate adoption if it continues to lose customers to fiber and fixed wireless. But we can also expect to see fixed wireless customers incrementally migrate to fiber connectivity for two reasons. WISPA, the Wireless ISP Association, notes that about a third of its membership has or is deploying fiber, proactively switching customers to a product that delivers higher symmetrical speeds and is more reliable and predictable than wireless connections.
Such switches will also be made when there’s not enough RF capacity to support a customer base seeking high-speed connectivity. In many cases, the upgrade to fiber can free up radio equipment for redeployment in another area, enabling an expansion cycle that increases revenue from existing customers while adding new service areas over time.
It is clearly documented that RF-based solutions such as fixed wireless and satellite have clear limitations, especially in their ability to provide symmetrical bandwidth. Ookla reported that median FWA download speeds dropped from the first quarter to the third quarter in 2025, according to Fierce, with the most probable culprit being that operators have exhausted their available spectrum, leading to congestion. Similarly, SpaceX’s Starlink publishes congestion maps showing where they are essentially overloaded. Users in these areas pay “demand surcharges,” one-time fees of up to $1000, depending on how overloaded the local area is.
The solutions to RF congestion are to beg or buy access to more spectrum and, in the case of low Earth orbit solutions, launch more and bigger satellites at steadily increasing rates. We don’t have an infinite amount of spectrum and at some point we will reach an upper limit of satellites we will tolerate cluttering the night sky.
More speed, more productivity, more fiber
Why people want faster connections and symmetrical speeds might be a mystery to some, but most don’t like to wait to upload or download things. Average U.S. household data use per month continues to grow, with RVA’s analysis showing usage growing from around 100 GB per month in 2015 to approaching 700 GB per month in 2025, a nearly seven times increase over the past decade.
The continued adoption of smart devices in such fields as home safety, pet care, telemedicine, and the growth of AI only drives the need for more total bandwidth and more symmetrical bandwidth. High-definition 4K video incorporated into security cameras for home and businesses and for use in video calls is one example of how more data will continue to be sent upstream, driving the need for symmetrical connectivity.
For the e-commerce website and remote worker, waiting for files to download and cloud services to load is time that isn’t spent on productive work. More than a decade ago, Amazon found that every 100ms in latency cost the company 1% in sales. Research has conservatively estimated that about 11% of interactive time spent on a 100 Mbps broadband connection is simply spent on waiting, adding up to a productivity loss of around 20 minutes per day, based on an assumption of 3 hours of interactive work moving around files and working with cloud services. Moving to a gigabit connection cuts wait time to around 2 minutes per day, adding up to about 180 hours in productivity per year, with heavy interactive users such as remote workers gaining almost 32 more productive workdays annually.
What else we know going into 2026 …
Finally, we know the continued adoption and application of AI is increasing fiber within data center, to connect data centers to each other on a local and regional basis, and to connect data centers with end-users at home, small business, and enterprise levels. While most of the hype has been around trying to build artificial general intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities, agentic AI tools that can improve productivity and lower costs by supplementing – not replacing – human workers is a much more practical and near-term goal.
For example, service providers will benefit from agentic AI solutions that will deliver zero touch networks, automatically adjusting to network conditions and individual user needs as required without human intervention. A virtual work group conducting video conferencing requiring low latency and high bandwidth would subtly and automatically get priority for its participants across the network over less immediate tasks, financial applications between customers and bankers would get a combination of priority and higher security, while hard-core gamers could pay for and receive higher network priority on demand. All these functions would be managed automatically by AI, rather than laboriously configured and changed within the network as required today.
It’s for all these reasons why I expect 2026 to be the biggest yet for the fiber broadband industry, with more homes getting fiber for the first time, more homes having two or more fiber providers to choose from, and more fiber being deployed across the country to fuel the growth of AI in the months and years to come.
