Fiber gets nimble: small telcos weaving fiber web

Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, may have cleared the North Woods, but Bunyan’s tremendous axe and prodigious appetite for pancakes vanished from the scene before the gentle giant had the chance to do something really useful for Minnesota—provide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections to rural residents. That task would be left to his namesake, the Paul Bunyan Telephone cooperative, which has been stringing fiber to homes in northern Minnesota since 2004.

While Verizon gets most of the US press for its FTTH FiOS rollout, small operators like Paul Bunyan have quietly been laying fiber of their own for years. According to quarterly trade journal FTTH Prism, half of all rural telcos are now deploying fiber of some kind, and many are choosing to run it all the way to customer homes.