Fiber-to-the-Home Council Statistics Show Verizon Sets the Pace in Installing Next-Generation Services

Cable Companies Lag by 70-to-1 Margin; Report Shows Cable Ads Misleading

By a wide margin, Verizon continues to be the most powerful force in the re-wiring of North America, leading other telephone companies, local exchange companies, towns, developers and cable multisystem operators in connecting homes to new services with 100 percent fiber-optic links. Those are the key findings of a newly released study by an independent group.

In its semi-annual study released Tuesday (April 8), the Fiber-to-the-Home Council reported that 11.8 million homes are passed by fiber-optic cables and 10 million can now be connected, while nearly 3 million already have service on fiber all the way to the home. In total, about 10 percent of all North American homes are passed by fiber cables, with FTTH growth running at 97 percent annually.

Verizon, the council said, leads the pace with more than 70 percent of the current total fiber connections. Cable operators have installed less than one percent of the total all-fiber services.

“Cable companies frequently claim in their ads that they have fiber just like Verizon,” said John Wimsatt, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon. “But this report, from an independent group, shows that the leader by miles in deploying fiber-optic technology all the way to customers is Verizon. No cable company even comes close to providing this level of service using this powerful, new technology.”

The council’s news release and accompanying slides can be found at http://www.ftthcouncil.org/?t=284 and http://www.ftthcouncil.org/documents/137785.pdf, respectively.