Until recently, major U.S. telcos have had to balance new fiber-to-home infrastructure with other business model demands. And so long as they stuck mostly to copper access infrastructure, they also ceded the home broadband market to cable operators.
That finally seems to be changing.
As Frontier Communications continues to replace copper access with optical fiber, its revenue is shifting away from copper-based products. Since 2020, customer take rates have grown slightly from 41 percent to 42 percent of homes passed by the FTTH network.
Which means--should that take rate continue--that revenue growth is correlated with the number of FTTH home passings Frontier is able to create.
source: Frontier Communications
Telco executives often say that FTTH is a better network than hybrid fiber coax. Customers do not always agree.
Initial uptake might be in the 20-percent range, if Frontier’s experience matches that of other telco FTTH providers, scaling over time to about 40 percent. That still means cable operators have most of the rest of the market, on the order of 60 percent.
Few observers think telcos will do better than 50-percent market share. Eventually, if required, cable operators will respond with their own FTTH networks.
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