The availability of optical-fibre connectivity to large and medium-size commercial buildings in the US has jumped to 54.8% in 2017, based on Vertical Systems Group research.
The research firm says the US fibre gap has dropped to less than 50% (45.2%) for the first time. This annual benchmark quantifies the scope of fibre lit buildings in the US with twenty or more employees.
Encompassing more than two million individual business establishments, this base of commercial buildings maps directly to the addressable market for higher speed carrier Ethernet, cloud, data centre, hybrid VPN and emerging SDN-enabled services.
"More commercial U.S. buildings were newly lit with fibre during 2017 than in any other year since we initiated this research in 2004. The number of net new fibre lit buildings increased across every building size segment, and most substantially for medium-size sites," said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group.
"Deployments will continue to accelerate because fibre is both a strategic asset for delivery of wireline business services, as well as a necessity for enabling 5G."
For the analysis, a fibre lit building is defined as a commercial site or data centre that has on-net optical fibre connectivity to a network provider's infrastructure, plus active service termination equipment onsite. Excluded from the analysis are standalone cell towers, small cells not located in fibre lit buildings, near net buildings, buildings classified as coiled at curb or coiled in building, HFC-connected buildings, carrier central offices, residential buildings, and private or dark fibre installations.
