FTTH Council Argues for the Economic and Social Benefits of More Bandwidth

To compete, to lead, to excel – America needs more speed in its broadband networks.  That’s why the FTTH industry is moving forward toward the day when every American community can tap directly into fiber networks offering almost unlimited bandwidth. FTTH networks today are capable of delivering transmission speeds of up to 100 megabits per second downstream – and almost as much upstream. And one of the great things about fiber is that it’s “future proof” – that is, the technology keeps improving will continue to enable vast increases in bandwidth over the same fiber.

In just the past four years, more than four million U.S. households have been connected directly into these high-speed, all-fiber networks. And while the U.S. continues to have one of the world’s highest growth rates with regard to FTTH deployment, we still have a long way to go before catching up with industrial competitor countries such as Korea and Japan, where 100 megabit subscriber connections are now commonplace.

To ensure our competitive edge in the coming decades, America must move quickly toward becoming a “100 Megabit Nation.” To accomplish this, Congress could enact tax incentives for deployment of higher broadband networks, much the way it did so successfully back in 1986 to accelerate deployment of next-generation communications infrastructure. Congress should also block states from prohibiting local governments from deploying high-bandwidth telecommunications networks – as many states now do that. Local video franchising regulations often serve as an obstacle to deployment of fiber-to-the-home networks, and states should be encouraged to streamline these processes so that fiber-to-the-home providers are not discouraged from entering new markets and bringing new, competitive choices to consumers with regard to video, voice and data services. More than 20 states have recently done so. And rural areas will continue to need special attention to ensure their people living there get access to higher broadband networks.