NTCA: Rural Fiber Deployments Fueling Dramatic Increases in Higher Speed Broadband Take Rates

NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association represents rural broadband carriers, most of whom have roots as rural telecommunication companies. Broadband carrier is probably a better descriptive term these days, as many those ‘telcos’ also count cable TV, wireless (fixed and mobile), and cloud services as a part of their service portfolio. They recently published results from their annual Broadband/Internet Availability Survey, conducted in the Winter of 2014. Deploying fiber based services remains a priority for NTCA members, with 39 percent of survey respondents citing the use fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology in their networks today.

Among current FTTP providers, 25 percent say they can reach their entire customer base with the technology. A little less than half (45 percent) of current FTTP providers reach at least half of their customer base with the technology, according to the results. Rural customers, like their urban counterparts, are subscribing to faster broadband speeds. Roughly one-third (33.6 percent) of NTCA carrier member customers are taking a broadband tier of 10 Mbps or more, the highest subscribed to category. That’s a dramatic increase from a year ago, where NTCA reported that only 8.5 percent subscribed to a similar tier, an improvement of almost 400 percent. The survey report didn’t offer any additional detail of the actual speeds offered beyond “above 10 Mbps.”