There's good news and bad news about the U.S. fiber growth -- On the good news side, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) installations have grown 83 percent since last October and fiber now reaches 398 communities in 43 states, according to research released by the Fiber Optic Communities in the United States (FOCUS). On the bad news side, the U.S. is badly lagging the rest of the world in fiber deployment and is, in fact, losing ground. '"There are roughly 213,000 premises wired with fiber today out of 100-some million. It's not a very big percentage," said Max Kipfer, FOCUS' founder and president. "As a country we dropped to 16th in the world in fiber deployments." Europe has over a half million and Japan has 1.2 million fiber-connected premises. Ninety percent of Danish residents have access to 10 megs of data or better and pay only 30 Euros a month for it, he said. "We're a long way away and we're dropping fast," he said. Kipfer blamed several factors for the nation's slow fiber deployments.
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