- AI-driven demand is accelerating fiber growth, especially in enterprise and data center connectivity
- Cable operators remain the primary competitive threat, even as new fiber entrants push into local markets
- Customer education, not supply, is emerging as one of the industry’s most persistent bottlenecks
FIBER CONNECT 2026, ORLANDO, FLORIDA — If Gary Bolton’s keynote at Fiber Connect 2026 in Orlando framed fiber as the backbone of the AI economy, conversations with operators on the ground made clear how uneven that shift still looks in practice.
On one hand, demand is real, immediate and expanding. On the other hand, the industry is still contending with something more basic: explaining to customers why fiber matters at all.
Conversations with Ripple Fiber CEO Greg Wilson and Sarah Davis, Fidium Fiber’s VP of market development, at the show today, highlight how the AI-driven shift is playing out — and where it is falling short.
The two companies approach the market from very different starting points.
Fidium Fiber, formerly known as Consolidated Communications, is a legacy operator in transition. It operates in 26 states with “just over 2 million passings” and delivers fiber to “homes, businesses, institutions and other network service providers,” including infrastructure for wireless networks and large enterprises, according to Davis.
Ripple Fiber, by contrast, is a relative newcomer. Wilson said the company was launched “about three years ago” and has already reached “270,000 passings today,” with ambitions to scale “north of one and a half million.”
Despite those structural differences, both companies are seeing the same macro shift: AI is beginning to reshape demand in ways that play directly to fiber’s strengths.
For Fidium, that shift is showing up in enterprise and infrastructure deals tied to the data center boom. “We are entering into major data center deals all over,” Davis said, describing fiber as the “backbone for cell tower communication” and other emerging workloads.
At the same time, demand is diversifying. “We are seeing increases in customers, we are seeing different kinds of customers, we are seeing just continued demand for more bandwidth,” she said, pointing to sustained growth across segments.
Wilson framed the AI impact more cautiously, but underscored the same directional trend. “I think it reconfirms that… fiber is absolutely necessary,” he said, particularly as latency and reliability become more critical. He also emphasized that the real impact of AI is indirect. “It’s not AI itself… it’s really the knock-on effect that AI is going to create,” Wilson said, citing increased content creation and uploads to the cloud as key drivers of network demand.
Those dynamics are now feeding directly into strategy.
Fidium is leaning into its enterprise footprint and infrastructure role, while continuing to expand fiber deeper into its territory. Davis said it is targeting more than 70% fiber penetration in its footprint in the near term, with a longer-term push toward 80%.
Ripple, meanwhile, is focused on scaling its residential base — but with an emphasis on subscriber conversion. “It’s only a valuable business if you’ve got the subscribers,” Wilson said, noting that penetration, not just passings, determines long-term value.
The customer education strategy
That focus on subscribers leads directly to what both companies describe as their most persistent challenge: customer education. Wilson said adoption is far from automatic, even where fiber is available.
“Only about 10, maybe 15% of consumers… want fiber as soon as there’s fiber,” he said, adding that most “see it as another internet brand.”
That confusion is compounded by how competitors position their offerings. “The cable providers talk about fiber-powered networks… how’s the consumer supposed to understand the difference between a fiber-powered network and a fiber network?” he said.
Fidium is seeing similar friction, particularly in rural and older markets. “It’s a lot of customer education,” Davis said, pointing to demographics and familiarity with legacy copper-based services as barriers to upgrading.
Competition, meanwhile, remains intense — and in many cases unchanged. Both companies identified cable operators as their primary competitors for subscribers. Beyond that, competition varies by market. Wilson noted that “Verizon and AT&T are certainly competitors” for territory, alongside regional “disruptors” like Brightspeed and Lumos that are expanding their own fiber footprints.
Neither company sees fiber supply as a constraint for now. Both companies work with multiple vendors and secure capacity well in advance, said Davis and Wilson. Fidium's Davis said relative stability due to long-term supplier relationships and ongoing construction at scale is key but she acknowledged pricing pressures and specific regulatory constraints.
The takeaway
AI is not creating demand for fiber from scratch, rather it is accelerating and reshaping demand that was already building. The real question is how much of that demand operators can actually capture.
The hardest task, and the one that will increasingly determine winners and losers, is translating fiber availability into customer adoption in a market where the value proposition is still not fully understood.