Will I ever get fiber?
With consumer demand for fiber-to-the-home service increasing all the time, more and more people are asking, “Will I ever get fiber?”. Providers like Verizon Fios have been impressing consumers with their super fast fiber based broadband and TV service. They consistently rank in the top for customer satisfaction survey’s and outperformed all other ISPs ability to deliver advertised speeds according the first FCC Broadband Report (published 2011). In fact, Verizon’s Fios service and the FCC Broadband Report was probably the biggest factor in pushing other ISPs to actually deliver on their advertised speeds as evident by the most recent 2013 study.
Google has changed the course of history for one small town in Kansas by choosing it as their test ground for Google Fiber: a super fast fiber to the home service offering speeds of 1 gigabit. But what about the majority of the population in the U.S. that does not have access to fiber-to-the-home? Unfortunately Google isn’t planning to grow into a large ISP. Any additional Google Fiber cities will be few and far between. The same goes for Fios. Verizon spent over $20 billion building the Fios infrastructure, and the capital costs have taken a toll on their balance sheet. In order to keep investors happy, they had to stop new Fios build-outs and focus on customer acquisition in the existing areas. If there’s no Fios installations in your town now, don’t expect any in many years to come. If you live in a town where Verizon is not the incumbent phone service provider, don’t expect Fios in the next decade.
