With all the buzz of late about ISPs doubling down on fiber builds, there’s the question of whether fiber is cost-efficient enough to bridge the digital divide.
Executives speaking at Fierce Telecom’s Digital Divide Forum believe the cost of fiber isn’t as egregious as people may think. Gary Johnson, CEO and general manager at Paul Bunyan Communications, noted fiber’s front-end costs don’t compare to its long-term benefits.
“When we put in fiber networks we know it’s in there for decades,” Johnson said at a Wednesday session. “We’re not going to be rebuilding it, we’re burying all our infrastructure. So it’s got a long tail in terms of that investment.”
Tom Maguire, COO at Brightspeed, echoed those thoughts, acknowledging that while fiber as a standalone technology looks expensive, assessing its total cost of ownership is key.
“There are some elements of building a fiber infrastructure that are a little bit more expensive…hand holes and duct banks and things like that,” he explained. “When we started putting fiber in the ground it was B-PON, now we’re up to XGS-PON and the optical distribution network didn’t change at all.”
That, Maguire added, speaks to fiber’s future-proof capabilities – especially as the amount of bandwidth people consume continues to climb. Brightspeed has a bevy of fiber build plans, most recently announcing expansions in Missouri, Louisiana and five other states.
Though constructing new infrastructure is important, Chris Denzin, COO at Ziply Fiber, pointed out leveraging existing broadband infrastructure as a way to reduce fiber costs.
“With Ziply Fiber as an ILEC, our civic partners see the fiber network deployments reach completion faster and extend further by leveraging existing network facilities,” Denzin said at the session’s keynote address.
Ziply has put in work building out the fiber network it acquired from Frontier in 2020. The operator has deployed 100G enabled fiber routes across over 80 suburban and rural markets in the Pacific Northwest, Denzin noted. Ziply also aims to cover more than 1 million locations across its footprint over the coming years. Denzin also said Ziply is exploring micro-trenching as a cost-saving alternative to fiber boring.
Other cost-effective measures Ziply’s trying out include an all-in-one ONT router and G.fast fiber nodes. "Swapping out the structured wiring inside older properties is very expensive and time-consuming,” Denzin said. “So [Ziply’s] using technology to find a better way to deliver gig or faster speeds.”
Similarly, Brightspeed has leveraged technology from vendors such as Corning, Maguire said on the panel, to reduce build costs.
“We found the advent of plug and play [fiber cables] seems to be the way to avoid some cost,” he pointed out. “That not only speeds things up but it also helps to reduce the need for splicing, which is where a lot of cost lies.”
Maguire went on to say Brightspeed is also standardizing its fiber cable sizes. “By standardizing materials, we’re able to get bigger reels of things and just cut off what we need and use that same reel on the next job,” he said.
Labor supply is another essential cost component, to ensure there is a skilled enough workforce to deploy fiber. Paul Bunyan Communications is a fiber cooperative that serves around 6,000 square miles in Minnesota. “As a small rural provider, we’re not going to recruit away from a lot of other people,” said Johnson.
The provider is instead investing into building up its own workforce, such as creating an in-house curriculum for local educational institutions.
“When you look at the installation of a fiber network and the IT infrastructure that wraps around it,” he continued, “that’s a skill set we can apply in a lot of ways…these are very valuable skills that we will use no matter what the future holds for us.”
Public-private partnerships
The panel rounded out the discussion with a nod to public-private partnerships for subsidizing fiber builds. There’s nearly $100 billion available in federal broadband funding, as Cisco Business Development Manager Robin Olds pointed out in his keynote.
But the grant-seeking process can be complex, Maguire said, especially for smaller providers. Hurdles can be things like challenge processes and changing application requirements.
“The process differs from state to state, in some cases county to county,” he said. “I think if there’s a way for states to think about ways that they could simplify the process, because anything that a winning company gets out of this program will benefit the residents of their individual communities.”
“We participated in ReConnect,” Johnson said. “Not a simple process to go through particularly for a company of our size. It’s a very complex application process.” He added the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund also has its issues due to not properly pre-screening applicants.
But progress has been made with funding accessibility. All 50 states have submitted their applications for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.
Despite ongoing hurdles, Johnson said he is pleased to see what’s happening on the state and federal levels for broadband deployment. “We are real bullish right now that there’s finally that recognition that everyone needs broadband – that universal service matters,” he said.
Catch a replay of the full discussion by registering here.