This new benchmark, unveiled by Vertical Systems Group in August, ranks the eleven companies with 10,000+ on-net U.S. commercial buildings with lit fiber connections. Retail and wholesale fiber providers with 10,000 or more on-net fiber lit commercial buildings in the U.S. qualified for the list.
Eleven companies attained a position on the 2016 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings Leaderboard as follows (in rank order by number of fiber lit buildings): AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Level 3, Cox, Lightower, Zayo, Altice USA and Frontier.
The Challenge Tier of providers includes companies with lit fiber connections to between 2,000 and 9,999 U.S. commercial buildings. Seventeen companies qualified for the Fiber Lit Buildings Challenge Tier as follows (in alphabetical order): 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.
“On-net fiber 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 fiber lit building is ready connectivity with provisioning through service orchestration, without the construction cost and extensive lead time required to light a building,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group. “These dynamics are driving this year’s acquisitions among fiber providers that will significantly impact the U.S. fiber landscape. Eighteen of the twenty-eight Fiber Leaderboard and Challenge Tier companies have fiber-related transactions just completed or pending.”
All other fiber providers with fewer than 2,000 U.S. commercial fiber lit buildings are in the Market Players tier. The Market Players tier includes more than two hundred metro, regional and other fiber providers, including the following companies (in alphabetical order): 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, WOW and others.
*Vertical Systems Group’s “Leaderboards” are industry benchmarks for measuring Service Provider market presence. For more information on methodology, see Leaderboards.
