Fiber to All – A $3.2 Trillion Impact 

Fiber to All – A $3.2 Trillion Impact

Delivering fiber to all the households and businesses in the United States would provide an estimated $3.24 trillion dollars of value to the nation’s citizens, according to a newly released economic study conducted by The Brattle Group. Deploying fiber to the 56 million households currently unserved by fiber would generate $1.64 trillion in increased housing values alone while household income would increase by $1.6 trillion in net present value (NPV), primarily in non-urban areas. 

“Fiber is a very critical infrastructure technology, and it is not just limited to providing fiber,” said Paroma Sanyal, Partner & Co-Lead of Telecom, Media, and Entertainment Practice at Brattle on the November 20, 2024, Fiber for Breakfast podcast. “Broadband is very important for backhaul, which means it is also important for advances in 5G, 6G, and other generation technologies and wireless that we’ll be seeing. Therefore, fiber is a long-term catalyst for [the] long-term economic engine.” 

“Economic Benefits of Fiber Development” was conducted by the Brattle Group to analyze the incremental effect of fiber over other wired high-speed technologies, such as hybrid fiber-coax and does not examine other forms of technologies with higher latency and lower performance. On a global basis, the U.S. is lagging behind numerous other counties in deploying fiber, especially when compared to highly economically productive countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and China. Brattle’s research projects that fiber would add between 14 to 17% to a U.S. household home currently without fiber, a 3% increase in annual average income, and create over 380,000 new jobs for the country.  

Most of these economic benefits would accrue to rural areas. “A majority of the unserved households are in non-urban census tracts, meaning rural and suburban census tracts,” said Sanyyal. “If we are going to focus on Rural America getting the same kind of service as the rest of the country, deploying fiber is really important. That’s where the gap is.”  

Brattle Group Partner & Co-lead of its IP Practice Coleman Brazelon described fiber’s other benefits that were not quantified or addressed in the current study. “Fiber is quite unique among broadband technologies in that it’ll have significant benefits down the line,” said Brazelon. “The architecture of it is so flexible that whatever the deployment, whatever the developments in the fiber market are, in five,10, 15, 20 years, the fiber investments made today will be able to benefit from those in a way that won’t have the technology lock that other technologies will have.” 

Fiber also was cited for its lower carbon footprint than HFC, having up to 96% less carbon emissions, and enabling an increased remote work rate of 22.5% percent that delivered a reduction in carbon footprint of 54% compared to people having to travel into the office on a daily basis. For more information on fiber’s economic benefits to the national economy, tune in to the latest Fiber for Breakfast.  

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