AT&T Beats Verizon, Spectrum in Fiber-Lit Buildings

AT&T retained the top spot for the fourth consecutive year on Vertical Systems Group’s (VSG) year-end U.S. Fiber-Lit Buildings Leaderboard.

The 13 fiber providers that qualified had 10,000 or more on-net U.S. commercial fiber buildings at the end of 2019. Following AT&T in order of ranking are Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Cox, Crown Castle Fiber, Frontier Communications, Zayo, Altice USA, Atlantic Broadband, Windstream and Consolidated Communications.

Windstream dropped to No.12, down from 11th on the year-end 2018 leaderboard, which included 11 providers.

The top four companies each have more than 100,000 on-net, fiber-lit buildings. Atlantic and Consolidated gained a spot on the leaderboard for the first time, moving up from the “Challenge Tier.”

“The number of on-net, fiber-lit commercial buildings exceeded 1 million in 2019 as network providers concentrated on U.S. footprint expansion,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal of VSG. “New fiber deployments are providing dedicated access to network services, connecting 5G small cells, enabling low latency for edge computing and supporting the massive bandwidth surge for web-scale companies. Our 2020 outlook is that while essential fiber deployments will proceed, some planned installations will be adjusted due to unanticipated capacity demands caused by the coronavirus crisis.”

Conterra, DQE Communications and Everstream advanced to the Challenge Tier, moving up from the Market Player tier. GTT and FiberLight dropped to the Market Player tier from the Challenge Tier.

Other Challenge Tier companies: Cincinnati Bell, Cleareon, Cogent, FirstLight, IFN, Logix Fiber Networks, Segra, Unite Private Networks and Uniti Fiber. They qualified with 2,000-9,999 U.S. fiber buildings.

The Market Player tier includes all other fiber providers with fewer than 2,000 U.S. commercial fiber-lit buildings. It features such companies as Fusion, TPx and WOW! Business.

We recently reported on Vertical Systems Group’s global Ethernet provider rankings. AT&T was king, followed by Colt, CenturyLink and Orange Business. BTT Global Services, Verizon and NTT rounded out the leaderboard.