The study finds that rural counties with high broadband adoption rates of over 80% have significant advantages over those with low usage, including:

• 213% higher business growth. Rural counties with high broadband use see more businesses opening, while similar counties with low broadband utilization are losing businesses. On average, rural areas with low broadband usage lose three or more businesses each year. This drop in business activity likely means fewer jobs for residents, leading to a noticeable population decline.
• 10% higher self-employment growth. Broadband access can significantly lower barriers to starting a business for rural residents by connecting them to global markets and essential resources, like access to banks, small business loans and venture capital. Broadband enables entrepreneurs to conduct market research and leverage digital marketing strategies, expanding their customer base and facilitating e-commerce. It supports remote work and collaboration, widening the pool of potential employees and reducing reliance on physical proximity to urban centers. Rural communities with higher broadband adoption rates have seen significantly more business startups.
• 44% higher GDP growth. High broadband use in rural communities creates an environment that fosters local businesses, triggering a chain reaction of growth and innovation synonymous with a stronger and more dynamic economy. Access to more broadband services delivered by local broadband service providers improves the economic dynamism of rural communities.
• 18% higher per capita income growth. Counties in the high broadband treatment group (with broadband adoption rates greater than 80% and broadband coverage predominantly from a small broadband service provider) saw per capita income grow 18% from 2020-2022. This amounts to an increase of nearly $500 per person each year on average for county residents.

Stakeholder participation is essential to making locates and the construction process go smoothly. Transparency throughout the locate process and excavation with the stakeholders will ensure optimal project efficiency start to finish.

The data that stands behind this paper is only as reliable as the participants in the submittal process make it. Damage is expensive, however participating in the DIRT report by entering data anonymously will provide deeper understanding of the root causes of damage plaguing our industry, unnecessarily inflating project costs.

Adhering to these recommendations in this paper should encourage collaboration among facility owners, locators, and excavators, leading to timely and accurate underground utility locates, which is critical for the prosperity of unserved and underserved communities.

Communications service providers seeking to improve sustainability metrics associated with their broadband deployments will find that overbuilding an HFC plant with fiber will initially cause an incremental increase in carbon footprint — but after converting customers to fiber, the annual reduction in operational carbon will provide a break-even payback in six years. With fiber’s ability to scale to nearly unlimited bandwidth speeds, transitioning networks from HFC to fiber provides a far more sustainable option now and for decades to come.

The study, which surveyed 3,500 consumers, indicated that the average consumer spends about three hours of interactive time online per day (setting aside time watching streaming content or in video conferences where delays do not generally apply). With internet file sizes growing larger year-over-year, the average “web-surfer” in 2024 (who has an internet connection of 100 megabits per second) ends up losing about 19.8 minutes everyday waiting for loading times. That means this person would lose about 138.6 minutes every week or about 120 hours every year waiting for their internet to load! Think about what can be done with that time.

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Fiber scalability and longevity are intensely technical topics. This paper is an attempt to condense many of the main topics into a readable form. However, FBA strongly recommends the reader also visit the supporting references provided throughout the document.

Cartesian received input to this study from across the industry and nation. Respondents spanned the fiber construction ecosystem from traditional providers to contractors and represented 35 states in total based on primary deployment locations. Information was gathered via phone interviews and online surveys in October and November 2023.

While no two deployment projects are alike, we found many common themes.