Fiber Deployment Has Significant Incremental Economic Benefits According to a Recent Brattle Report
Prepared for the Fiber Broadband Association and Frontier Communications
A Brattle team recently prepared a report for the Fiber Broadband Association and Frontier Communications on the economic benefits of fiber deployment.
Currently, about 62 million broadband serviceable locations (BSLs) – including 56 million households, approximately 40 percent of the households in the US – do not have fiber broadband, and there is an ongoing debate about whether there would be economic benefits if fiber were deployed to these locations, which are already served by high-speed broadband but do not have fiber broadband. In the report, the Brattle authors discuss the potential benefits and drawbacks of fiber deployment to such locations and are the first to show that deployment has significant incremental economic benefits – even in the presence of other high-speed broadband technologies. The authors argue that because private actors will not capture all the benefits of fiber deployment, the marketplace will not deploy enough fiber on its own, and thus deployment should be promoted through federal and local government programs.
The full report, “Economic Benefits of Fiber Deployment,” is available below.
