Not Even FTTH Might Propel Non-Cable ISP Gigabit Share

One has to remain impressed with the commercial success of the hybrid fiber coax platform used by cable TV companies. Where most of the rest of the telecommunications world has remained fixated on fiber to the home as the platform of the future, cable operators tweaked an inconsistently-available coaxial cable network into the leading supplier of home broadband connections in the United States and a few other countries, with economics arguably better than FTTH for brownfield operations and a more-graceful approach to network upgrades.

In 2016 the cable industry passed about four percent of U.S. homes with networks offering 1 Gbps internet access. By 2018 80 percent of U.S. homes were able to buy gigabit per second service. 

source: CableLabs 

By way of comparison, all FTTH passings number something more than 50 million. There are about 141 million U.S. homes in total. So FTTH passes roughly 35 percent of U.S. homes. Not all those connections are capable of supplying gigabit connections at the moment, though. 

Assume there are 21 million active FTTH connections in the United States. Assume there are a total 103 million total broadband accounts. According to Openvault, in the third quarter of 2020 about five percent of U.S. customers bought gigabit service. 

That implies a total of no more than 5.15 million U.S. gigabit accounts in service. Assume all internet service providers other than cable operators have 30 percent of those accounts, implying about 1.5 million 1 Gbps ISP accounts sold by all firms other than cable operators. 

That further pimples that gigabit FTTH accounts in service represent about seven percent of active FTTH connections. Cable gigabit connections are likely to be closer to five percent of total broadband accounts. 

source: Fiber Broadband Association, RVA 

The point is that we sometimes too casually equate physical media with speed, or physical media with specific speeds, such as gigabit per second connections. Neither FTTH nor HFC directly equate with gigabit service or availability. 

However, cable TV operators do claim about 70 percent of the broadband installed base, possibly representing 3.6 million active gigabit accounts. As early as 2009, at least 75 percent of the fastest U.S. broadband connections were supplied by cable TV operators.  

At the same time, cable HFC platforms arguably have proven more effective than FTTH at generating incremental new revenues for platform owners, while suffering less from demand changes as voice and linear video began to shrink, the former since 2000, the latter since 2012 or so. Telco voice lines have fallen as much as 70 percent since 2000. Cable linear video accounts are down less than 15 percent since about 2012.