According to the Fiber Broadband Association, over 50% of U.S. households have access to fiber internet as of March 2024 — up from 45.9% in December 2021. Those numbers are expected to keep growing since Fiber to the Home (or FTTH) is the gold standard of internet connections.

What is fiber broadband? It’s the fastest method of delivering high-speed internet. Fiber broadband connections bridge the “last mile” between a provider’s mainstream internet “backbone” and a customer’s home or business.

Faster and Ready for the Future

The biggest benefit of fiber is that it can offer much faster speeds over much longer distances than traditional copper-based technologies like DSL and cable. Because fiber-optic technology uses light instead of electricity to transmit data, the frequencies that are used are much higher and the data capacity is much greater. Light moves extremely fast (186,000 miles per second), enabling internet speeds up to 1,000 Mbps (one Gigabit) on fiber-optic networks — 10 times faster than a common 100 Mbps connection.

Fiber broadband is also considered to be future-proof technology. Even if typical broadband speeds become 1,000 times faster in 20 years, a single existing fiber-optic connection can still support it. What’s more, fiber is resistant to electrical interference like storms that affect DSL, cable, and wireless systems.

An Investment to Meet Growing Needs

Installing a new fiber-optic network is a large capital expenditure for service providers. However, as the cost to maintain aging copper networks increases over time, more and more providers will choose to upgrade to fiber. This transition is also being accelerated by significant federal funding for fiber deployment. Making this investment in fiber technology is the best way to meet customer demands for faster and more reliable internet connections.

Our country has made great strides in providing faster internet service. Speedtest.net reported that the U.S.’s median download internet speed as of February 2024 was 242.38 Mbps, which is the 6th fastest median internet speed in the world. This helps satisfy the growing reliance on online resources for both business and residential users — including working and learning from home, cloud-based services, video and VoIP phone systems, telemedicine, gaming, streaming, and more.

The Madison Communications fiber-based network provides the fastest internet service in the region with speeds as fast as 1 Gbps! Call 1-800-422-4848 or visit gomadison.com to learn more.