AT&T tops 2016 US fibre-lit buildings leaderboard
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AT&T tops 2016 US fibre-lit buildings leaderboard

AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise and CenturyLink are at the top of Vertical Systems Group’s table for wholesale and retail fibre providers to buildings in 2016.

The ranking contains both wholesale and retail fibre providers with 10,000 or more on-net fibre-lit commercial buildings in the US, based on market presence.

Of the 11 companies that earned a place on the board, AT&T was positioned at number one, followed by Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Level 3, Cox, Lightower, Zayo, Altice and Frontier.

Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group, said: “On-net fibre-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 fibre-lit building is ready connectivity with provisioning through service orchestration, without the construction cost and extensive lead time required to light a building.”

Below the top 11, Vertical Systems Group lists what it calls the challenge tier of 17 companies with 2,000 to 9,999 lit fibre connections between US commercial buildings. In alphabetical order they are: 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.

Other fibre providers with fewer than 2,000 US commercial fibre-lit buildings are placed in the market players tier. The list for 2016 includes more than 200 metro, regional and other fibre providers, which, in alphabetical order includes Alpheus, Axia, Birch, C Spire, Centracom, Conterra, DQE Communications, EarthLink Business, Fatbeam, Global Capacity, GTT, Hawaiian Telecom, Hibernia, Hunter Communications, Independents Fiber Network, Infostructure, Logix Communications, LS Networks, Mediacom, Monmouth Telecom, Orca Communications, Pilot Fiber, PS Lightwave, Shentel, Silver Star Telecom, Sovernet, Spirit/Palmettonet, Syringa, TDS Telecom, TPX Communications, U.S. Signal, Veracity, Wilcon and WOW.

“These dynamics are driving this year’s acquisitions among fibre providers that will significantly impact the US fibre landscape. Eighteen of the 28 fibre leaderboard and challenge tier companies have fibre-related transactions just completed or pending,” added Cochran.

OpenSignal, the wireless coverage mapping company, released a report of its own review of the performance of the four major US mobile carriers – AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile US. According to the results Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile US ranked top, scoring highest in LTE and 3G speeds, latency, download speed and LTE availability, based on five billion test results that took place between 21 March and 29 June 2017.

T-Mobile’s test revealed a 90% LTE availability rate, narrowly beating out Verizon, which showed an availability rate of 89.8%. Sprint came at 81.6%, up from 76.8% only six months ago.

The data revealed that AT&T and Verizon experienced a decrease in network speeds following both companies bringing back unlimited data plans. Drops were by 12% and 7% respectively. Sprint and T-Mobile US however showed a steadily increase in speeds on their networks.



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