- Fiber providers need to build 92,000 route miles to keep up with data center growth, according to RVA
- But fiber is poised to face supply chain constraints
- On the home front, the U.S. now has nearly 100M fiber passings
We’ve seen the writing on the wall for awhile that data centers need fiber and lots of it. Research from RVA LLC has now done the math and worked out that providers need to build about 92,000 new route miles in the next five years to support that demand.
Suffice to say, the pressure is on for suppliers.
“Everybody talks about the constraints of power, cooling, land and chips and so forth, but fiber is also a constraint,” said RVA Founder and CEO Mike Render at a Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) webinar Wednesday.
He noted a single cable can contain “hundreds or thousands” of fiber strands and that cabling will only get smaller. Corning, which is already dealing with a supply crunch, has said one Meta data center campus will consume “8 million miles of optical fiber.”
Fiber providers are now juggling the needs of AI and the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, Render said. He hopes there won’t be a repeat of what happened during the pandemic, when providers bought more product than needed and left vendors overflowing with unused inventory.
The good news? All that fiber demand means more providers – including small rural operators – can get in on the data center action.
Rural data centers typically need three to four different routes to ensure uptime and network redundancy, Render noted. “And who knows that better than local providers in a rural area?”
Aside from data centers, he thinks there are plenty of opportunities for fiber-to-the-tower to connect cell sites, fiber-to-the-room as bandwidth demands climb and even fiber-as-a-sensor.
“You can use a fiber now continuously and make the whole thing that microphone or that temperature sensor. And you can even tell exactly in that fiber where something is occurring,” he said, arguing the need for fiber sensor tech has “never been greater” as accidental and intentional fiber cuts increase.
U.S. FTTH passings reach 98M
RVA noted that 2025 marked another record for U.S. fiber-to-the-home deployments, with 11.8 million new homes passed and ready for sale.
Fiber broadband is now marketed to 84.6 million unique homes, with Render pointing out some of those households may have two or three fiber passings. When including homes with more than one passing, that brings the country’s overall passings count to 98.4 million.
RVA’s data comes from various sources, including surveys, public data companies release as well as the government and Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Despite deployments surging and fiber providers building on top of each other, average FTTH take rates have steadily increased, “which is significant because it takes about five years once you build and start marketing to homes for most of the passings to become actual connections,” Render said.
RVA also looked at FTTH passings for Canada, which hit 14.5 total homes passed in 2025 with a 75% penetration, compared to 60% in the U.S. However, Render said it’ll be a challenge for Canada to bring fiber to its remaining rural locations.
“From here on out it gets tougher because their rural is much more rural than the U.S. rural,” he said. “It’s going to be a slog to get all the way there.”