(gigaom.com) -- Fiber deployments aren’t just good for the consumers — for small to medium-sized telcos they are also good for the bottom line, resulting in an average operating savings of 20 percent. The data, which came from a Fiber to the Home Council survey issued Tuesday, also noted that the number of homes that can access fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks increased by 17.6 percent over a year ago to 22.7 million.
The number of households connected with FTTH now stands at 9.7 million, an increase of more than 20 percent over April 2012.
Most of the cost savings associated with FTTH deployments came from an end to costly maintenance and down time on telco networks, which one would expect if you are going from an aging DSL network to a newer network. However, offering fiber also enabled these smaller and mid-sized telcos to offer TV offerings as well as faster speeds, which enables them to compete against cable or satellite providers.
While in North America the lion’s share of fiber to the home deployments are deployed by Verizon’s massive FiOS build out and a similar (but smaller) Bell Aliant roll out in Canada, the survey notes that over 600 smaller ISPs have deployed fiber to the home in some or all of their footprints and about 100 municipalities have also built out networks. It also found that more than 640,000 North American households now get 100 Mbps service through a FTTH network, and many of those connections offer the same speeds for both uploads and downloads.
Google Fiber in Kansas City and EPB Chattanooga in Tennessee both got a shout out in the release accompanying the survey for their gigabit connections. And for those wondering why their ISP would spend the money to deploy fiber to the home, it’s clearly something customers are warming up to — there’s a 44.8 percent take rate in homes passed — a number that is on the rise.
The survey was conducted for the council by RVA LLC and involved more than 350 telecommunications providers across North America.
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