- 35.1 million Americans now subscribe to fiber broadband
- In 2024, there were an additional 10.3 million fiber homes marketed to
- Of that 10.3 million, 8.4 million were passed and marketed with fiber for the first time
The U.S. fiber industry set another record in 2024, marketing fiber to 10.3 million new homes, up from 9.1 million new homes marketed to in 2023, according to data compiled by Michael Render, CEO and principal analyst at RVA LLC.
The data covers September 2023 through September 2024 and is derived from a number of sources including surveys conducted by RVA as well as public government information and data from trade associations.
The 10.3 million new homes marketed (as well as the 9.1 million homes from last year) also includes 2nd passings to some homes. In 2024, 8.4 million homes were passed and marketed with fiber for the first time.
Fiber broadband is now marketed to 76.5 million U.S. homes, and if you include homes with more than one fiber passing, there are now 88.1 million FTTH passings in the U.S.
Speaking today on a Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) webinar, Render said, “We had good growth in 2024 of 13%. We’re now at 35.1 million homes connected.”
After the webinar, Fierce Network spoke with Render who said the 13% was the overall increase in passings against the base from last year.
According to the research, fiber now passes 56.5% of U.S. households and 18% of second homes.
But as Render pointed out, there’s still a lot of addressable market left to deliver fiber broadband. “It’s not like we’re three years away from finishing this job,” he said. “First of all, households increase every year. For the next decade, we’ve looked at a conservative 1 million household increase per year.”
Compared to the 88.1 million homes currently passed, there are still 149 million passings to go. Render said that in dense middle-income and high-income areas, there will likely be more than one fiber provider.
Competition for fiber
The closest competitor to fiber broadband is cable’s hybrid fiber coax (HFC). “It does the best after us in terms of its speed tests and latency tests and so forth,” said Render. But still, RVA’s data shows that over the past two years, 41% of customers who were churning from their previous provider or who were new to broadband chose fiber. Conversely, – 33% of churning customers or those new to broadband chose HFC.
“HFC lost a lot of people, and even in new customers, they didn’t do as well,” said Render. “Fiber won in both new customers and in churn.”
He said the cable industry is counting on DOCSIS 4.0 as its “Holy Grail,” but he added, “I’m skeptical about that. I still think the churn will occur rapidly to fiber.” He said there’s a general perception that fiber is the best type of broadband. He noted that in the third quarter 2024, the public cable companies lost 265,000 internet customers.
At a recent UBS investor conference, Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson warned that Comcast expects to lose “just over 100,000” broadband subscribers in Q4 as the market remains “competitively intense.”
