If your local phone company does not offer fiber-to-the-home service, it risks seeing its market share as a broadband competitor drop to zero, according to new research from Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson.
As the cable industry prepares to deploy DOCSIS 4.0, capable of much faster upload speeds in the gigabits and downloads as fast as 10 Gbps, the future of telephone companies that have under-invested in their networks for years is dire. The research firm’s “Equilibrium Forecast” sees DSL’s market share in areas where cable broadband is available dropping to zero. Phone companies that have invested in fiber half-measures, including fiber to the neighborhood, IP-DSLAM, and VDSL technology that traditionally delivers internet speed between 25-75 Mbps are not far behind. Only true fiber-to-the-home service stands a chance at protecting phone company broadband market share.
“DSL [and] mid-tier [fiber/copper combinations are both] obsolete,” researchers said in a private note to investors. “Broadband is increasingly a two-horse race between cable and telco fiber-to-the-home service, where it exists.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased problems at the nation’s legacy phone companies, as customer losses accelerate in favor of cable company delivered internet. In the first quarter of 2020, cable company broadband sign-ups increased 122% compared to the same quarter last year, while phone companies said goodbye to at least 65,000 subscribers. Last year during the first quarter, telcos managed to add 20,000 customers.
Leichtman Research Group reports that most customers are looking for stable and reliably fast internet service, and phone company DSL delivers neither. Having a speedy and dependable connection has become crucial as tens of millions of Americans work from home to avoid contracting the illness. Sharing that internet connection with kids staying home from school quickly caused a spike in upgrade orders.
“The increased level of usage was enough to convince many customers that they needed higher speeds to handle the number of simultaneous users in their home,” MoffettNathanon wrote.
Many phone companies lacking fiber were unable to deliver on upgrades, and customers that could went shopping for alternatives. At the same time, large DSL providers like Frontier Communications and Windstream have become mired in bankruptcy and have been losing residential customers for years. MoffettNathanson told its investor subscribers it was time to declare DSL effectively dead as a competing technology, with fiber service variants like U-verse and other flavors of VDSL near-dead.
“As with legacy DSL, it is increasingly clear that this segment is simply not competitive anymore. Equilibrium market share in this cohort, if one looks out far enough, is 100/0.”
MoffettNathanson expects cable operators will achieve an 85% market share for broadband service in markets where their chief competitor is a phone company yet to provide fiber-to-the-home service. If phone companies do not embark on immediate fiber upgrades, the damage to their market share could be permanent, especially after DOCSIS 4 arrives, according to the researchers, because the newest cable broadband platform may be able to erase fiber’s speed advantage.
This week, the FCC announced bidding has finished for the latest Connect America Fund (CAF) broadband subsidies auction.
Once again, the FCC gave first priority to incumbent phone companies to bid for the subsidies, which defray the cost of expanding internet access to homes and businesses otherwise unprofitable to serve. Nearly $2 billion was left on the table by disinterested phone companies after the first round of bidding was complete, so the FCC’s second round opened up the leftover money to other telecom companies.
Winning bidders will receive their portion of $198 million annually in 120 monthly installments over the next ten years to build out rural networks. In return, providers must promise to deliver one broadband and voice service product at rates comparable to what urban residents pay for service. The winning bids, still to be publicly announced, will come from rural electric and phone cooperatives, satellite internet providers, fixed wireless companies, and possibly a handful of cable operators. But much of the money overall will be spent by independent phone companies rolling out slow, copper-based, DSL service.
Because the total committed will take a decade to reach providers, rural Americans will likely face a long wait before what purports to be “broadband” actually reaches their homes and businesses.
While many co-ops will spend the money to expand their own homegrown fiber-to-the-home services, most for-profit providers will rely on wireless or copper networks to deliver service.
Virtually everywhere in developed countries (except the United States), fiber broadband is quickly crowding out other technologies, despite the significant cost of replacing copper networks with new optical fiber cables. If a provider is brave enough to discount investor demand for quick returns and staying away from big budget upgrade efforts, the rewards include happier customers and a clear path to increased revenue and business success.
Not every Wall Street bank is reluctant to support fiber upgrades. Credit Suisse sees a need for optical fiber today, not tomorrow among incumbent phone and cable companies.
“The cost of building fiber is less than the cost of not building fiber,” the bank advised its clients. The reason is protecting market share and revenue. Phone companies that refuse to upgrade or move at a snail’s pace to improve their broadband product (typically DSL offering 2-12 Mbps) have lost significant market share, and those losses are accelerating. Ditching copper also saves companies millions in maintenance and repair costs.
Canada’s Telus is a case in point. Its CEO, Darren Entwistle, reports Telus’ effort to expand fiber optics across its western Canada service area is already paying off.
“We see churn rates on fiber that are 25% lower than copper,” Entwistle said. “35% lower in high-speed internet access, and 15% lower on TV — 25% lower on average. We’re seeing a reduction in repair volumes to the tune of 40%. We’re seeing a nice improvement in revenue per home of close to 10%.”
Telus promotes its fiber to the home initiative in western Canada as a boost to medical care, education, the economy, and the Canadian communities it serves. (1:31)
Telus’ chief competitor is Shaw Communications, western Canada’s largest cable company. Fiber optics allows Telus to vastly expand internet speeds and reliability, an improvement over distance sensitive DSL. Shaw Cable has boosted its own broadband speeds and offers product bundles that have been largely responsible for Telus’ lost customers, until its fiber network was switched on.
In economically challenged regions, fiber optic expansion is also growing, despite the cost. In Spain, Telefónica already provides service to 20 million Spaniards, roughly 70% of the country, and plans to continue reaching an additional two million homes and businesses a year until the country is completely wired with optical fiber. In Brazil, seven million customers will have access to fiber to the home service this year, expanding to ten million by 2020.
Verizon and AT&T regularly ring alarm bells in Congress that China is outpacing the United States in 5G wireless development, but are strangely silent about China’s vast and fast expansion into fiber optic broadband that companies like Verizon stopped significantly expanding almost a decade ago. China already has 328 million homes and businesses wired for fiber and added another five million homes in the month of June alone. AT&T will take a year to bring the same number of its own customers to its fiber to the home network.
The three countries that are most closely aligned with the mentality of most U.S. providers — the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany — are changing their collective minds about past arguments that fiber to the home service is too costly and isn’t necessary.
The government of Martin Turnbull’s cost concerns forced a modification of the ambitious proposal by the previous government to deploy fiber to the home service to most homes and businesses in the country. That decision to spend less is coming back to haunt the country after Anne Hurley, a former chief executive of the Communications Alliance involved in the National Broadband Network (NBN), admitted the cheaper NBN will face an expensive, large-scale replacement within a decade.
ABC Australia reports on findings that the country’s slimmed-down National Broadband Network is inadequate, and parts will have to be scrapped within 5-10 years (1:37)
Turnbull’s government advocated for less expensive fiber to the neighborhood technology that would still rely on a significant amount of copper wiring installed decades ago. The result, according to figures provided to a Senate committee, found only a quarter of Australians will be able to get 100 Mbps service from the NBN, with most getting top speeds between 25-50 Mbps.
Despite claims of technical advancements in DSL technology which have claimed dramatic speed improvements, Hurley was unimpressed with performance tests in the field and declared large swaths of the remaining copper network will have to be ripped up and replaced with optical fiber in just 5-10 years.
“If you look around the world other nations are not embracing fiber-to-the-[neighborhood] and copper … so yes, it’s all going to have to go and have to be replaced,” she said.
In the United Kingdom, austerity measures from a Conservative government and a reluctant phone company proved ruinous to the government’s promise to deliver “superfast broadband” (at least 24 Mbps) over a fiber to the neighborhood network critics called inadequate from the moment it was switched on in 2012. The government had no interest in financing a fiber to the home network across the UK, and BT Openreach saw little upside from spending billions upgrading the nation’s phone lines it now was responsible for maintaining as a spun-off entity from BT. In 2015, BT Openreach’s chief technology officer called fiber to the home service in Britain “impossible” and too expensive.
Two years later, while the rest of Europe was accelerating deployment of fiber to the home service, the government was embarrassed to report its broadband initiative was a flop in comparison, and broke a key promise made in 2012 that the UK would have the fastest broadband in Europe by 2015. Instead, the UK has dropped in global speed rankings, and is now in mediocre 35th place, behind the United States and over a dozen poorer members of the EU.
What was “impossible” two years ago is now essential today. The latest government commitment is to promote optical fiber broadband using a mix of targeted direct funding, “incentives” for private companies to wire fiber without the government’s help, and a voucher program defraying costs for enterprising villages and communities that develop their own innovative broadband enhancements. The best the government is willing to promise is that by 2033 — 15 years from now — every home in the UK will have fiber broadband.
Deutsche Telekom echoed BT Openreach with claims it was impossible to deliver fiber optic broadband throughout an entire country.
Deutsche Telekom’s dependence on broadband-enhancements-on-the-cheap — namely speed improvements by using vectoring and bonded DSL are increasingly unpopular for offering too little, too late in the country. Deutsche Telekom applauded itself for supplying more than 2.5 million new households with VDSL service in 2017, bringing the total number served by copper wire DSL in Germany to around 30 million. The company, which handles landline, broadband and wireless phone services, is slowly being dragged into fiber broadband expansion, but on a much smaller scale.
In March, Telekom announced a fiber to the home project in north-east Germany’s Western Pomerania/Rügen district for 40,000 homes and businesses. The network will offer speeds up to 1 Gbps. In July, Telekom was back with another announcement it was building a fiber optic network for Stuttgart and five surrounding districts Böblingen, Esslingen, Göppingen, Ludwigsburg, and Rems-Murr, encompassing 179 cities and municipalities. But most of the work will focus on wiring business parks. Residents will have a 50% chance of getting fiber to the home service by 2025, with the rest by 2030.
In contrast, the chances of getting fiber optic broadband in the U.S. is largely dependent on which provider(s) offer service. In the northeast, Verizon and Altice/Cablevision will go head to head competing with all-fiber networks. Customers serviced by AT&T also have a good chance of getting fiber to the home service… eventually, if they live in an urban or suburban community. Overbuilders and community broadband networks generally offer fiber service as an alternative to incumbent phone and cable companies, but many consumers don’t know about these under-advertised competitors. The chances for fiber optic service are much lower if you live in an area served by a legacy independent phone company like Frontier, Consolidated, Windstream, or CenturyLink. Their cable competitors face little pressure to rush upgrades to compete with companies that still sell DSL service offering speeds below 6 Mbps.
CAF funding from the FCC offers some rural areas a practical path to upgrades with the help of public funding, but with limited funds, a significant amount will be spent on yesterday’s technology. In just a few short years, residents will be faced with a choice of costly upgrades or a dramatic increase in the number of underserved Americans stuck with inadequate broadband. Policymakers should not repeat the costly mistakes of the United Kingdom and Australia, which resulted in penny wise-pound foolish decisions that will cost taxpayers significant sums and further delay necessary upgrades for the 21st century digital economy. The time for fiber upgrades is now, not in the distant future.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel examines fiber optic telecommunications cables.
Germany has an internet access problem not very different from the one afflicting the United States and Canada. The national phone company, still partly owned by the government, remains mostly dependent on a decades-old wireline telephone network to deliver landline and DSL broadband service. The only way Deutsche Telekom will invest adequately to replace it with optical fiber is if they get assurances from the federal government they will be allowed to monopolize access to it.
According to the business weekly WirtschaftsWoche, a sister publication of Handelsblatt, Telekom executives have agreed to build a fiber-optic network everywhere in Germany provided that it is excluded from European anti-monopoly rules so that Deutsche Telekom wouldn’t be forced to open its network to competition.
The proposal from the German telecom giant was particularly audacious because many in the country blame it and its uncompetitive behavior for creating Germany’s slow broadband problem, but that did nothing to stop the company from asking to be shielded from competition.
“A fundamental departure from the kind of logic that viewed regulation of Deutsche Telekom (DT) as the normal state in the last 20 years is urgently needed,” the company said in a filing with the German Federal Network Agency, which regulates the internet in the country.
For most Germans, DT is the problem. The phone company has proven itself a formidable competitor across many parts of eastern Europe, where it bought control of privatized telecommunications companies that used to operate as government monopolies. But back home in Germany, it has been happy to continue offering DSL service that the rest of Europe cannot get rid of fast enough. In certain larger cities like Munich and Cologne, upstart fiber to the home providers have filled the broadband gap and have wired significant parts of both cities, and DT has responded with a fiber offering of its own without complaining about the cost of building a fiber network or the return on its investment.
Oberbürgermeister Wolff
But in smaller towns and villages across Germany — particularly in the eastern states, broadband has been terrible for years and under DT’s “leadership” it has not gotten much better, allowing other countries in the EU to sail past Germany in broadband rankings. Like AT&T and Verizon in the U.S., DT claims that where it has not upgraded its network, there is either no demand for fiber fast internet speed or inadequate return on investment. Also like in the U.S., DT has spent its money on other technologies, notably wireless, while investment in landline networks has not kept up.
Some German communities like Bretten, fed up with inaction, have taken charge of their own broadband future and are building their own fiber to the home networks. Martin Wolff has dreamed of a digital economy boost for his town of 28,000 located near Karlsruhe in western Germany.
As mayor, he has begged and pleaded with DT to give Bretten something beyond lackluster DSL service, which is now too slow to handle the kind of 21st century internet applications that better wired communities take for granted. Mayor Wolff wants Bretten known as a gigabit city. DT, in contrast, wants to leave Bretten as a forgotten digital backwater. The phone company had repeatedly told the community the broadband it gets now is more than good enough and nobody should hold their breath waiting for something better. DT’s few competitors, including Britain’s Vodafone, weren’t interested either. Bretten is too small… too… irrelevant to matter to their investors.
“They are only interested in serving the cream of the crop in the cities and don’t come to rural areas,” the mayor said.
Like in North America, Germans are asking themselves who should be in charge of their digital future — investor-owned telecom companies or the community itself. The country’s continued embarrassing showing in European broadband rankings has become an issue of national pride and has sparked a loud debate between established telecom companies and the public that wants faster and better broadband.
The noise of the debate has attracted the politicians, and the issue of German broadband has now taken center stage in the parliamentary elections, which will be held Sept. 24. Handelsblatt reports the issue of inadequate broadband now interests German voters more than the latest economic policy position paper or how Germany will manage to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump for the next three years. Many Germans have plenty of time for these kinds of offline debates, because online, it can take a minute to load a webpage on some of the country’s dial-up like DSL connections.
“Germany is one of the most under-supplied countries in Europe, especially in terms of rural coverage,” wrote Bernd Beckert, an internet expert at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, in a recent study of European broadband. He said countries such as Switzerland, Spain and even tiny Estonia are far ahead of Germany. In fact, the Baltic states and many former Eastern bloc countries are moving towards a fiber future while Germany considers wrapping itself even tighter in copper wiring installed in the 1960s. More than 70% of German internet users get internet access through a DT-provided, ADSL-equipped landline. Many connect at just 1-6Mbps, about the same speed users were getting in the late 1990s when DT’s internet monopoly was abolished.
Since then, DT has done everything possible to encourage “competitors” to not build competing networks. In fact, most competing ISPs like 1&1, Versatel, Telefonica Deutschland, and Vodafone rent DT DSL-capable landlines to provision service to their customers. That means they cannot compete on speed and they are forced to rely on DT to maintain its wireline network. It is no accident that German adoption of fiber optics is stuck at only 1.8%, fifth from last place among the 35 member states of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In comparison, Japan and South Korea have more than 70 percent of their customers on fiber to the home connections.
Germany’s largest political parties that have been in government since 2005, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) have tolerated DT and its anemic upgrade policies. Broadband stagnancy, many believe, would not be possible without acquiescence and appeasement by those in control of the country. That conspiracy theory is backed by many of Germany’s smaller political parties which believe it is time to change the government’s involvement with DT.
The Left Party’s platform supports nationalizing DT and returning it to a state-owned enterprise that will answer to the public policy priorities of the next government. The capitalist, pro-business Free Democratic Party wants to get the government completely out of its 32% remaining stake in DT and hope that free market solutions will emerge. In the meantime, that party proposes to use the proceeds of any sale to fund a national broadband subsidy fund to convince private telecom companies to upgrade their networks in underserved areas.
DT has not stayed quiet in the public policy debate either. After disappointing the German public by rejecting a proposal to build an open, nationwide fiber to the home network, the company has instead promised to upgrade existing DSL lines to newer technologies like VDSL and vectoring, which DT claims could deliver up to 100Mbps service. American phone companies like Verizon have been reluctant to head in a similar direction, admitting many of the next generation DSL technologies work better in the lab than in the field. Many of the technologies promoting the most dramatic speed improvements have also proved to be vaporware so far.
Deutsche Telekom HQ Bonn, Germany
“We are committed to vectoring, because it is the only way to provide people in rural areas with faster lines quickly,” Deutsche Telekom said in a blog post published in August. “If we are fixated on [fiber to the home], those in the countryside will remain left behind for years. It is simply impossible to roll out fiber lines to homes everywhere in the country. Neither the construction capacity nor the funding is available for that. Plus, there is quite simply no demand for it.”
Some of the other competitors in the market seem to agree with DT.
“No provider can achieve fiber optic expansion on its own,” said Valentina Daiber, a member of the board of Telefonica. Daiber said DT was already nearly $60 billion in debt. Daiber said she hoped a solution could be found after the election.
But just a week after Daiber made that claim Vodafone announced it will spend $2.4 billion on a new fiber to the premises network targeting 100,000 companies in 2,000 German business parks. The company will also spend up to $450 million partnering with municipalities to extend the network to about one million rural homes, in addition to boosting its current broadband speeds delivered to German cable customers to 1Gbps.
That announcement could cause DT’s DSL plans to eventually collapse, if Vodafone follows through on its fiber buildout.
Mayor Wolff has no intention of waiting to see how it all plays out. Wolff has convinced private fiber optics company BBV to install the fiber infrastructure and has a Dutch investor partner arranging $12 million in financing, which is always the biggest stumbling block to get fiber buildouts underway. Upfront construction costs often deter many municipalities and would-be competitors from launching. But for Wolff, where there is a will, there is a way to deliver fiber fast broadband, and he is making certain it happens sooner rather than later.
VDSL2 vectoring and G.fast are only as good as the copper wiring that extends to each customer. Up to 45 percent of North American wire pairs are in some state of disrepair.
Verizon has no interest in using advanced forms of DSL as part of its next generation broadband service.
Speaking at ADTRAN’s Broadband Solutions Summit, Verizon’s director of network planning Vincent O’Byrne made it clear DSL variants and copper wiring were not going to be a part of Verizon’s future network platform.
“We have no strategy for G.fast,” O’Byrne told Telecompetitor in response to a question about whether the company would upgrade or deploy advanced forms of DSL as part of overhauling its broadband networks.
Some telephone companies with large legacy copper networks have promoted DSL advancements including bonding, VDSL, and G.fast in lieu of costly fiber upgrades to shareholders and customers to improve the sluggish 6-10Mbps speeds many customers get from DSL service. But O’Byrne said Verizon has had nothing but headaches trying to make its legacy copper network actually deliver the improved broadband speeds those technologies promise on paper.
O’Byrne admitted Verizon’s copper network has not aged well, calling it “poor” in some areas. Verizon’s previous efforts to deploy VDSL and ethernet over copper to multiple dwelling units (MDUs) like apartment buildings and condos turned out so poorly, O’Byrne does not want to repeat those mistakes in the future.
For urban areas and MDUs, O’Byrne stressed he plans to take fiber all the way to each condo unit or apartment and get rid of the copper.
Verizon’s next generation fiber strategy will depend heavily on NG-PON2 technology, which is managed by unpowered splitters and filters — dramatically cutting the hardware costs associated with active fiber networks. Many PON networks are fiber to the premises, but then rely on Wi-Fi or Ethernet wired networks once inside a building. Verizon prefers an all-fiber solution, which is unusual among U.S. carriers. AT&T, CenturyLink and Windstream still use G.fast for relatively short runs of existing copper phone wiring inside MDUs and homes.
Verizon’s O’Byrne believes an all-fiber solution may cost more upfront, but will deliver better longevity, value, and fewer problems over time.
Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy blames slow Internet connections on your lousy home Wi-Fi network, not on his company’s broadband service.
McCarthy hoped to convince investors attending the J.P. Morgan Global High Yield & Leveraged Finance Conference earlier this month that Frontier’s last-mile network performance isn’t the real problem, it’s his customers’ Wi-Fi, and delivering faster broadband service isn’t going to solve many speed woes.
“I think the biggest issue that we face in having those kind of increments of capacity is the experience in the home can be substandard not only for us and they perceive a speed issue, but it’s really a Wi-Fi issue,” McCarthy said. “If you look at that many of the perceived speed issues in a home are purely due to a neighbor on the same Wi-Fi channel, which can cut your throughput by 50 percent.”
McCarthy claimed at least 40 percent of the complaints Frontier customers lodge about the company’s broadband service relate to the home Wi-Fi experience. Oddly, customers of other broadband providers don’t seem to complain as much about the performance of their Internet access provider. Frontier scores #12 on Netflix’s speed performance ranking, delivering an average of 2.51Mbps video streaming performance. It isn’t great, but it beat Windstream, Verizon DSL and last place CenturyLink.
Frontier Communications has promised to commit additional investment to expand and improve broadband after it completes its purchase of Verizon landlines in Florida, California, and Texas. Copper DSL customers may eventually get 25Mbps service, fiber customers up to 1Gbps. But the speed improvements have not been as forthcoming in Frontier’s original service areas, dubbed “legacy territories.”
McCarthy claimed more customers within its copper service areas will get speeds of 25-30Mbps, with some getting speeds of 100Mbps and above. But legacy customers often report they consider themselves lucky to see 6Mbps from Frontier DSL.
McCarthy
Despite that, McCarthy seemed to signal Frontier will direct much of its investment into its newest acquisition service areas, not the communities which have had Frontier DSL service for a decade or more.
“We’re investing in the copper facilities as we go into these three states,” McCarthy said. “We’ll be putting in the latest generation of bonded VDSL with vectoring capabilities at the DSLAM and that gives us the ability to have those 80-100 Mbps speeds.”
McCarthy does get the benefit of bragging the company has a larger amount of fiber broadband than ever before.
“Before we do the three-state acquisition, about 10 percent of our markets are passed with fiber-to-the-home and with these three markets about 55 percent of those markets are fiber-to-the-home,” McCarthy said. “We’ll have a substantial slug of markets passed with fiber.”
This excludes the fact Frontier did not build this additional fiber infrastructure itself. It acquired it from another company, in this case Verizon.
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Leichtman Research Group reports that most customers are looking for stable and reliably fast internet service, and phone company DSL delivers neither. Having a speedy and dependable connection has become crucial as tens of millions of Americans work from home to avoid contracting the illness. Sharing that internet connection with kids staying home from school quickly caused a spike in upgrade orders.
This week, the FCC announced 
Not every Wall Street bank is reluctant to support fiber upgrades. Credit Suisse sees a need for optical fiber today, not tomorrow among incumbent phone and cable companies.
In the United Kingdom, austerity measures from a Conservative government and a reluctant phone company proved ruinous to the government’s promise to deliver “
Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy blames slow Internet connections on your lousy home Wi-Fi network, not on his company’s broadband service.
Frontier Communications has promised to commit additional investment to expand and improve broadband after it completes its purchase of Verizon landlines in Florida, California, and Texas. Copper DSL customers may eventually get 25Mbps service, fiber customers up to 1Gbps. But the speed improvements have not been as forthcoming in Frontier’s original service areas, dubbed “legacy territories.”
