Cable operators occupied four of the 11 top spots in Vertical Systems Group's "U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD" for year-end 2016. Retail and wholesale fiber providers with 10,000 or more on-net fiber-lit commercial buildings in the U.S. qualify for the benchmark.
Eleven companies attained a position on the LEADERBOARD as follows (in rank order by number of fiber-lit buildings): AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Level 3, Cox, Lightower, Zayo, Altice USA and Frontier.
The Challenge Tier of providers includes companies with lit fiber connections to between 2,000 and 9,999 U.S. commercial buildings. Seventeen companies qualified for the Challenge Tier as follows (in alphabetical order): Cincinnati Bell, Cleareon, Cogent, Consolidated Communications, Electric Lightwave, Fairpoint, FiberLight, FiberNet Direct, FirstLight, IFN, Lumos, Southern Light, Sunesys, Unite Private Networks, Uniti Fiber, Windstream and XO.
"On-net fiber-lit buildings are valued strategic assets that give retail and wholesale providers a competitive edge in profitably delivering services to business customers. A major benefit of a fiber-lit building is ready connectivity with provisioning through service orchestration, without the construction cost and extensive lead time required to light a building," said Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group. "These dynamics are driving this year's acquisitions among fiber providers that will significantly impact the U.S. fiber landscape. Eighteen of the 28 Fiber LEADERBOARD and Challenge Tier companies have fiber-related transactions just completed or pending."
All other fiber providers with fewer than 2,000 U.S. commercial fiber-lit buildings are in the Market Players tier, which includes more than 200 metro, regional and other fiber providers.
