The fiber shortage is already here. And with data center builds as well as public and private rural fiber deployments all ramping, there's bound to be a breaking point sooner or later.
“It’s like the perfect storm,” Ashley Travers, chair of the Fiber Broadband Association’s Supply Chain Working Group, told Fierce. “You’ve got BEAD, you’ve got hyperscalers…with all these states coming out the gate at the same time, it’s going to present a challenge.”
She told Fierce the shortage impacts both ribbon and loose tube fiber. From a splicer’s standpoint, ribbon cable is “much more user friendly and much more organized” because multiple fibers are bonded together. That makes ribbon ideal for data center deployments and situations where space is limited.
Estimated lead times for ribbon fiber are in the “60-plus weeks range” while loose tube fiber, primarily used for outdoor infrastructure and fiber-to-the-home deployment, is “well into the Q3 [2026] timeframe,” said Kate Fegley-Lummus, Marketing Project Manager and Partner Manager at fiber cable manufacturer Superior Essex.
Fegley-Lummus, who’s responsible for tracking information on the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program and how much fiber will be needed there, said states and territories in their final proposals are projecting to deploy just under 500,000 miles of fiber for BEAD alone.
But BEAD has competition. RVA predicts fiber operators will also need to build 92,000 new route miles of fiber to connect data centers over the next five years. Because BEAD has been delayed for so long, “the data center builds were able to essentially leapfrog the BEAD builds,” Fegley-Lummus said.
It's still not clear when BEAD money will finally start flowing to states and ISPs, and all the while data centers are “rapidly buying up capacity every day,” she noted. Furthermore, fiber providers are still purchasing cables for ongoing public programs like the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) as well as privately-funded buildouts.
Fiber glass is also in short supply
Not only is there not enough capacity to go around, vendors also face a raw materials crunch, particularly for glass for fiber cables that need to comply with Build America, Buy America (BABA) rules.
According to Fegley-Lummus, there are currently only three U.S. vendors manufacturing BABA-compliant glass: Corning, OFS and Prysmian. Corning, which plans to ramp fiber and glass production for Apple and Microsoft, has particularly been vocal about supply constraints.
Travers said some vendors are concerned because they can’t get glass from their primary supplier and thus won’t be able to offer BABA cable to BEAD recipients.
“Some of them have voiced to me that they want to get waivers because they can get glass from offshore areas,” she said.
Obviously, data centers don’t have this problem because they’re not bound to use Buy America-compliant fiber. Still, there’s “so much more glass used for the data center cable” than traditional fiber builds, Fegley-Lummus noted.
Another issue, Travers said, is lot of fiber projects now are using BABA products “when they don’t need to, which has eaten up the supply that was available.” Companies like Nokia, STL and Vecima expanded their U.S. operations for BEAD long before NTIA revised the program’s rules.
Additionally, the broadband industry is already bracing itself for a workforce shortage ahead of BEAD – a shortage that’s poised to get worse once BEAD and data center fiber orders start happening simultaneously.
“You’re going to lose crews,” Travers said. “We’re already predicted short anyway, but those crews we could lose to competing hyperscaler projects or other states, and [then it’ll be] very challenging to get them back.”
BEAD, smaller ISPs most at risk
With its $42.5 billion allocation, BEAD is the single largest federal broadband investment in U.S. history. But that’s practically a drop in the bucket compared to all the multi-billion AI and data center deals out there.
“It’s not like BEAD’s going to roll out and [the vendors that make data center cables] are going to push pause on all data center [builds], because the money isn’t there, right?” said Fegley-Lummus. “Unfortunately, it’s just the nature of the beast of this program.”
And it’s the small, regional operators who will likely have to pay the biggest price.
If an operator like AT&T needs to buy $10 million worth of fiber versus a Tier 2 or Tier 3 provider that only needs to buy $100,000 of cabling, vendors are “just going to cater to the $10 million versus the $10,000 deal,” she said.
For BEAD providers, “there’s going to be a lot of money that comes out of pocket for those guys, because they have to get these projects done on those price points they set under the better bargain window,” Fegley-Lummus concluded.