Does Fiber Optics increase the value of your home?
Fiber to the home offers many advantages to residential customers and businesses alike and prepares everyone to enjoy an even greater selection of communication options in the future. It can do a lot for you and your family. You may already know that it enables you to do more in less time, but did you know that it can also add value to your home?

What basic factors contribute to a home’s value? Size, layout, location, age, and condition are a few. But, your internet connection is also an important factor these days. When many buyers are considering a home, they take the homes internet connection in to consideration and in a lot of cases will pay more for a home with a fiber internet connection. Some may even argue that a fiber connection is more important than location.

With the ever-growing want to move to rural areas, and the need to be connected, the presence and speed of reliable internet is a factor that people take into account when buying a house.

What is Fiber to the Home?
Fiber to the Home (FTTH) refers to the installations and use of fiber-optic cables to carry digital information directly to homes and businesses. These cables are made up of hundreds or thousands of fiber optics, which are long thin strands of pure glass about the diameter of human hair.

FTTH replaces the duplicate infrastructure that telephone and cable companies previously installed in neighborhoods. Fiber has a higher bandwidth capacity and can easily transmit applications like Internet, TV and Telephone with plenty of capacity left over for other applications in the future.

What does Fiber do to your home’s value?
Researchers at the University of Colorado and Carnegie Mellon University studied about 500,000 home sales from 2011 to 2013 in a recent study. The relationship between broadband connections, such as fiber, and house prices were investigated. It was found that a connection to fiber internet added 3.1% to the value of a home. The median home value used in the study was $175,000. The 3.1% increase would be an additional $5,437 to the median value. That is equal to adding a full fireplace or a ½ bathroom.

Robert Kaplan, Harvard Business School Professor, puts it this way; access to Internet over fiber is quickly becoming more important than roads when it comes to property value and infrastructure.

All of your homes features can impact its appraisal. The size, condition, school district, neighborhood, these are all factors that can affect your homes’ value; having the latest Internet technology matters now as well. It can increase the interest of potential buyers, improving the value of your home. And since fiber is relatively new and only available in certain areas, houses that are equipped for fiber optics are worth more.