The availability of business fiber continued to climb in 2011, with facilities available to 20.5 percent of commercial buildings across Europe, and 31.8 percent of commercial buildings in the United States, according to Vertical Systems Group data.

“These metrics are an indicator of the penetration of direct fiber supplied by one or multiple network service providers in commercial buildings with 20 or more employees,” the research firm adds. “Buildings that are not fiber-connected comprise the ‘fiber gap.’”
 
Throughout the world, direct fiber is the preferred access technology for higher-bandwidth business network services, particularly carrier Ethernet. Advantages of fiber connectivity include ease of provisioning, operational simplicity, bandwidth scalability and lower costs per bit as compared to other alternatives.?

"Access to business fiber has more than doubled between 2005 and 2011, both in Europe and in the United States; however, more than one million buildings in these markets are still not fiber-connected," explains Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group. "Domestic and global service providers will continue to strategically broaden and deepen their fiber infrastructures. A challenge for businesses caught in the fiber gap is to determine when their building sites will be connected via fiber to these service networks."

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