Open-Access Fiber Model Could Cover 80% of US Homes [2026]

A new open-access broadband model is gaining traction among network operators and municipal planners this week, as industry group ATIS and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society push forward technical and governance frameworks meant to make shared fiber infrastructure both more competitive and more resilient to outages. The approach reported by Fierce Network and amplified by The Register centers on a straightforward premise: separate who owns the physical open access broadband network from who sells service on it, then design the shared infrastructure so it can survive storms, cable cuts, and equipment failures without taking every provider offline at once.

The timing matters. Open-access broadband network deployments, where a single infrastructure owner leases fiber or conduit capacity to multiple competing internet service providers, have moved from a niche municipal experiment to a mainstream deployment strategy discussed by national regulators, telecom trade groups, and private equity-backed network builders alike. The question now on the table isn’t whether open access works commercially, it’s whether the hardware and network architecture behind it can be engineered for resilience at scale.

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What Changed This Week in the Open-Access Broadband Network Debate

According to reporting tracked through Fierce Network and corroborated by The Register, the open-access broadband network conversation has shifted from theoretical policy papers toward concrete operating models. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) says in a public statement that the decisions shaping America’s open-access future are being made right now, noting that its Open Access Network Forum (OANF) is actively convening internet service providers, infrastructure owners, and equipment vendors to hash out interoperability standards. That detail matters for hardware buyers and network engineers because interoperability, not just business-model theory, determines whether an open-access broadband network can actually swap in a backup provider during an outage without a multi-week integration project.

Separately, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society has been pushing what it calls a neutral, multi-tenant “fiber-to-the-community” (FTTC) model. The group describes this as a full recasting of the open-access concept: rather than a wholesale lessor handing off fiber to one exclusive last-mile provider, a neutral network operator runs both the physical fiber network and the service delivery layer all the way to the premises, while still allowing multiple ISPs to compete on top. Benton frames this as a way for the shared infrastructure to double as unified connectivity for residents, businesses, institutions, and other community infrastructure simultaneously, rather than serving each category through separate, redundant builds.

Why Resilience Is the New Battleground for Open-Access Broadband Networks

The hardware-level resilience question is where this story becomes a genuine network-infrastructure story rather than a pure policy debate. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) defines resiliency in its Broadband 101 reference material as the ability of a network to recover, converge, or self-heal and return to normal operations after a disruptive event, and it specifically ties that capability to the proper implementation of redundancies in the physical plant. For an open-access broadband network, that redundancy requirement is structurally different from a traditional single-owner ISP network, because the infrastructure has to stay standing and routable for every tenant ISP on it, not just one company’s subscribers.

In practice, that means the physical layer, fiber trunks, access nodes, splice points, and the optical transport hardware riding on top of them, has to be engineered with enough path diversity and failover capacity that a single fiber cut, hardware failure, or severe-weather event doesn’t cascade into an outage for every ISP and every subscriber riding that shared infrastructure. The same automated-recovery logic is already showing up elsewhere in networking hardware: HPE’s self-driving network technology reportedly resolves 70-80% of issues without human intervention, a benchmark open-access operators will likely be measured against as they build out shared infrastructure. The NTIA’s framing is notable because it reframes “open access” from a purely commercial or regulatory concept into an engineering requirement: the same physical network infrastructure is used by multiple providers delivering services to subscribers, which means a resilience failure has a multiplier effect that a closed, single-tenant network doesn’t carry.

The UTOPIA and AT&T Gigapower Examples

Two deployments are consistently cited as the clearest real-world examples of open-access broadband networks already operating in the United States: Utah’s UTOPIA network and AT&T’s Gigapower initiative. UTOPIA has long operated as a municipally backed, multi-city open-access fiber network in Utah, where cities build or co-invest in the physical fiber and multiple retail ISPs compete for subscribers on that same infrastructure. AT&T’s Gigapower, by contrast, represents the carrier-backed version of the same idea: a joint-venture fiber network, built with outside capital, that AT&T itself can sell service over while also opening capacity to competing providers.

These two models matter because they represent the two dominant flavors of open access now competing for capital and policy support: the municipal/public utility model (UTOPIA) and the carrier/private capital model (Gigapower). A banking-sector discussion published by CoBank frames this as a two-sided question for carriers themselves. One side is the “sell side,” where a carrier opens its own network for other ISPs to ride on, and the other is the “buy side,” where that same carrier buys capacity into someone else’s open-access build, such as Gigapower or a municipal network, specifically because doing so lets it reduce its own capital expenditure on last-mile construction. That buy-side dynamic is a meaningful shift: it suggests large carriers increasingly see open-access broadband network capacity as something to purchase rather than always build, which changes the economics of who actually owns the resilience-critical physical layer.

Open-Access Broadband Network Coverage Economics

The commercial case for open access rests heavily on coverage math. Research cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, drawing on analysis from Diffraction Analysis, found that a wholesale open-access fiber network could reach close to 80% of US households before any government subsidy becomes necessary, compared with roughly 50% coverage achievable under the existing, largely closed broadband-carrier model. That 30-percentage-point gap is the core economic argument every open-access advocate leans on: shared infrastructure spreads capital costs across multiple retail providers, which extends the geographic reach of unsubsidized private fiber investment well beyond what a single carrier would build alone in lower-density markets.

European data tells a similar growth story on a different axis. Research from Arthur D. Little found that open-access fiber and fiber-related transactions accounted for 45% of roughly €60 billion in European telecom-sector deals in 2019, showing how much deal capital was already flowing toward shared-infrastructure models even before the current resilience-focused push. The same research firm’s broader fiber study found that fiber coverage among benchmarked countries rose from 39% in 2012 to 66% in 2020, a 27-percentage-point increase, while the average fiber take-up rate, the share of homes passed that actually subscribe, grew from 15% to 42% over the same period. Those are not open-access-specific figures, but they describe the market backdrop against which open-access models are now being positioned as the next efficiency lever.

Model	Infrastructure Owner	Service Providers	Resilience Approach	Primary Example
Traditional closed carrier	Single ISP	One (vertically integrated)	Internal redundancy only, no cross-ISP failover	Legacy cable/telco networks
Wholesale open access	Independent network owner	Multiple, leasing capacity	Shared physical redundancy, provider-level failover	UTOPIA (Utah)
Carrier-backed open access	Joint venture (carrier + capital partner)	Carrier plus third-party ISPs	Carrier-grade redundancy extended to tenants	AT&T Gigapower
Neutral multi-tenant FTTC	Neutral network operator	Multiple, full service-layer access	Unified infrastructure serving homes, businesses, institutions	Benton Institute proposed model
Municipal public-private	City or utility	Multiple, via public-private partnership	Public oversight of redundancy standards	Various US municipal builds

How Open-Access Hardware Differs From Closed-Network Hardware

From a pure hardware standpoint, an open-access broadband network imposes different design constraints than a traditional closed network. A single-owner ISP can standardize on one vendor’s optical line terminals, one provisioning system, and one network management stack, because every subscriber on the network belongs to the same company. An open-access network, by definition, has to support multiple ISPs operating on shared physical media, which typically pushes operators toward more standardized, interoperable optical and routing hardware, since the network has to accommodate whichever providers sign on, not just one company’s preferred equipment stack.

That interoperability requirement is precisely why ATIS describes its Open Access Network Forum as convening ISPs, infrastructure owners, and vendors together rather than leaving standards to emerge informally. It mirrors a pattern already playing out elsewhere in networking hardware, where vendors like Credo have pushed a shared SRMO optics standard alongside seven industry partners specifically to keep multi-vendor networks interoperable. Without agreed interoperability standards at the optical and transport layer, an open-access broadband network risks becoming a patchwork where failover between providers, or hardware replacement after a fiber cut, takes far longer than it should, undermining the resilience case that makes open access attractive to municipal and regulatory stakeholders in the first place.

Who Is Backing the New Open-Access Push

Industry momentum behind open-access broadband network models is coming from multiple directions at once. On the standards side, ATIS says its OANF is actively shaping the technical decisions that will define America’s open-access future, positioning the group as a central venue for carriers and infrastructure owners to agree on shared technical ground. On the policy and research side, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society has been publishing detailed proposals arguing that cities should treat open, neutral fiber networks as a kind of operating system layer for municipal infrastructure, serving everything from households to public institutions through one unified build rather than parallel, redundant networks.

On the capital and deployment side, independent open-access ISPs and fiber builders, often smaller, regionally focused companies, have been expanding into new markets using the same shared-infrastructure logic, framing it publicly as a way to introduce real service-level competition and transparent pricing structures without duplicating fiber construction. Meanwhile, large carriers like AT&T are pursuing joint-venture open-access builds such as Gigapower, which lets them extend fiber reach using outside capital while still participating as one of the retail providers on the resulting network. Each of these groups has a different motivation, standards bodies want interoperability, researchers want broader coverage and public-interest outcomes, carriers want reduced capital exposure, but they are converging on the same underlying open-access broadband network architecture.

Open-Access Broadband vs. Traditional Carrier Networks: Competitive Comparison

The competitive dynamics here are genuinely different from a typical ISP rivalry story. In a traditional market, two or three carriers each build their own, separate last-mile infrastructure and compete entirely on service, price, and marketing, with no shared physical layer at all. In an open-access broadband network, the competition moves up the stack: the infrastructure owner competes to attract tenant ISPs and to keep the shared network reliable, while the tenant ISPs compete with each other purely on service quality, customer support, and pricing, since they’re all riding identical physical infrastructure.

That shift changes what resilience actually means competitively. In the closed-network model, a carrier’s network outage is a problem only for that carrier’s own subscribers and, potentially, a market-share opportunity for its rival with separate infrastructure. In the open-access model, a physical-layer outage hits every tenant ISP’s subscribers simultaneously, which is exactly why NTIA’s redundancy-based resiliency definition carries more operational weight in this context. The infrastructure owner has a much stronger incentive, and arguably a greater obligation, to engineer serious failover and redundancy, because a single point of failure now has a multiplied blast radius across every competing provider on the network.

Historical Context: How Open Access Got Here

Open access as a broadband concept is not new, it has circulated in US telecom policy debates for roughly two decades, often tied to debates over whether incumbent phone and cable companies should be required to lease their lines to competitors. What has changed in the current cycle, as described across Fierce Network’s ongoing coverage and the Benton Institute’s recent publications, is the framing: earlier open-access debates were largely about forcing incumbents to share existing copper or early fiber infrastructure through regulation. The current wave is instead driven by new fiber builds designed from day one as neutral, multi-tenant infrastructure, often financed by private capital or municipalities specifically because the open-access model offers a faster path to broader coverage than a single carrier building alone.

UTOPIA’s history in Utah stretches back to the mid-2000s as one of the earliest sustained municipal open-access experiments in the country, giving the current generation of advocates a multi-year operating track record to point to. AT&T’s entry into the open-access space through Gigapower, by contrast, is a much more recent move, reflecting how even large incumbent carriers have shifted from resisting open access to actively participating in it as a capital-efficient expansion strategy.

Expert Perspectives on Open Access and Resilience

Michael Mobley, a municipal broadband network leader, has pointed to concrete resilience benefits that open architecture can enable at the infrastructure level. As he put it in comments published by Broadband Communities Magazine, “One advantage of open access is that we could set aside half the data centers for the public anchor institutions to use. They can back up their data in a different town. For us, open access means opening the network not just to the ISPs but also to the community. We’ve designed extra room on the towers for emergency services and added a zone for FirstNET.”

That comment captures something the policy papers tend to understate: open-access infrastructure built with resilience in mind doesn’t just mean failover between ISPs, it can mean physically reserving capacity, tower space, and data-center resources for geographic redundancy and public-safety use cases like FirstNET, the dedicated nationwide public-safety broadband network. On the coverage economics side, research from Diffraction Analysis, cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, found that “a wholesale open-access fiber network could cover close to 80% of U.S. households before government subsidies are needed, compared with approximately 50% for the existing broadband-carrier model,” a gap that underpins much of the current investment case. Arthur D. Little’s European fiber research adds further texture, noting that “open-access fiber and fiber transactions accounted for 45% of approximately €60 billion in European telecom-sector deals in 2019,” and separately that “fiber coverage among benchmarked countries increased from 39% in 2012 to 66% in 2020, a rise of 27 percentage points,” alongside average fiber take-up rates that “increased from 15% in 2012 to 42% in 2020.”

Market Impact for ISPs, Vendors, and Municipalities

For smaller and regional ISPs, the open-access broadband network trend is largely a positive market development. It lowers the capital barrier to entering new markets, since a provider can launch service on existing shared infrastructure rather than financing its own last-mile fiber build, shrinking the time and cost needed to compete against larger incumbents. Regional operators are already chasing similar efficiency gains elsewhere in the stack, as seen when Maxx Conectado cut network latency by 5ms through an IP transit and colocation deal with Eletronet rather than building redundant long-haul capacity from scratch. For network hardware vendors, the trend pushes demand toward more standardized, interoperable optical transport and access equipment, since infrastructure owners serving multiple tenant ISPs need gear that plays well across different providers’ back-office and provisioning systems rather than proprietary single-vendor stacks.

For municipalities and utility districts, the calculus is shifting toward treating fiber infrastructure as a form of public utility, similar to water or electrical grids, a comparison that gained more weight after FERC approved PJM’s 50MW data center registry earlier this year, formalizing how grid operators track large infrastructure loads. The same oversight logic is now being floated for shared fiber networks, where the city oversees and sometimes owns the physical layer while leaving retail service to the competitive market. Trade coverage from Lightwave has documented communities taking creative steps to enable broadband themselves, including entering public-private partnerships or building their own open-access networks so multiple providers can offer service locally. For large incumbent carriers like AT&T, the Gigapower-style joint-venture approach offers a middle path: participate in open access as both an infrastructure investor and a retail competitor, capturing some of the capital-efficiency benefits without fully ceding control of the physical network.

Risks and Open Questions in the Open-Access Model

Not every detail of this transition is settled. The specific hardware standards that will govern interoperability across open-access broadband networks are still being negotiated through venues like the ATIS Open Access Network Forum, meaning there is currently no single universal technical standard that guarantees any ISP can smoothly join any open-access network. There are also open governance questions about who bears financial responsibility when a shared physical-layer failure disrupts service for every tenant ISP simultaneously, since liability and service-level agreements in a multi-tenant network are structurally more complex than in a single-owner network. Physical-layer vulnerability is not hypothetical, either: shared network infrastructure elsewhere has already been targeted directly, as when drone strikes hit three Yandex data centers in four days, a reminder that resilience planning for open-access fiber has to account for deliberate attacks on physical infrastructure, not just routine equipment failure.

There is also a capital-structure risk worth watching: as more carriers pursue the buy-side strategy described in CoBank’s industry discussion, purchasing capacity into networks like Gigapower or municipal builds rather than constructing their own, the long-term ownership and control of critical broadband infrastructure could concentrate among a smaller number of infrastructure-only entities. That concentration could, in theory, undercut one of open access’s core promises, diverse ownership supporting resilient, competitive markets, if too few companies end up owning too much of the shared physical layer.

Metric	Traditional Closed Network	Open-Access Network	Source
Potential US household coverage without subsidy	~50%	~80%	Diffraction Analysis, via Electronic Frontier Foundation
Share of 2019 European telecom deals	55%	45%	Arthur D. Little
Benchmarked fiber coverage, 2012	39%		Arthur D. Little
Benchmarked fiber coverage, 2020	66%		Arthur D. Little
Average fiber take-up rate, 2012	15%		Arthur D. Little
Average fiber take-up rate, 2020	42%		Arthur D. Little

What Comes Next: Five Predictions

• Expect ATIS’s Open Access Network Forum to publish or advance concrete interoperability specifications for optical and transport hardware within the next reporting cycles, since the forum itself frames these decisions as currently in progress rather than finished.
• More large carriers will likely pursue the AT&T Gigapower playbook, buying capacity into open-access and municipal networks rather than financing 100% of new last-mile fiber builds themselves, following the buy-side logic described in CoBank’s industry analysis.
• Municipalities will increasingly frame fiber infrastructure in Benton Institute-style “operating system for cities” language, treating neutral, multi-tenant networks as shared public infrastructure rather than a single company’s commercial asset.
• Resilience engineering, redundant paths, reserved emergency-services capacity, and FirstNET-style public-safety integration, will become a more visible selling point for open-access network operators competing for municipal contracts, following the model Michael Mobley described.
• Coverage-economics arguments citing the roughly 80% versus 50% household-reach gap will keep appearing in state and federal broadband funding debates as advocates push unsubsidized open-access builds as a complement to, not just a replacement for, subsidized rural programs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an open-access broadband network?
An open-access broadband network is a deployment model in which the same physical network infrastructure, typically fiber-optic cable, conduit, and associated transport hardware, is used by multiple internet service providers to deliver service to subscribers, rather than one company owning and operating the entire network exclusively.

How is resilience defined for these networks?
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration defines resiliency as a network’s ability to recover, converge, or self-heal and restore normal operations after a disruptive event, and specifically ties that capability to properly implemented redundancy in the physical infrastructure.

What are real examples of open-access broadband networks in the US?
UTOPIA in Utah and AT&T’s Gigapower initiative are the two most frequently cited examples, representing the municipal/public and carrier/private-capital versions of the open-access model, respectively.

Can open-access networks cover more households than traditional carrier networks?
Research cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and based on Diffraction Analysis found that a wholesale open-access fiber network could reach close to 80% of US households without government subsidy, versus roughly 50% under the traditional carrier model, because shared infrastructure spreads capital costs across multiple retail providers.

What is the Benton Institute’s “fiber-to-the-community” model?
It’s a proposal for a neutral, multi-tenant network in which a single neutral operator runs both the physical fiber and the service-delivery layer all the way to end users, while still allowing multiple ISPs to compete, and the network simultaneously serves homes, businesses, institutions, and other community infrastructure.

Who is setting technical standards for open-access interoperability?
ATIS, through its Open Access Network Forum, says it is actively convening ISPs, infrastructure owners, and equipment vendors to shape the technical decisions that will define interoperability across open-access networks in the US.

Why are large carriers like AT&T buying into open-access networks instead of only building their own?
Industry discussion published by CoBank describes a “buy side” strategy where carriers purchase capacity into networks like Gigapower or municipal builds specifically to reduce their own capital expenditure on last-mile construction, while still being able to sell retail service over that shared infrastructure.

Is the open-access broadband model new?
No. It has circulated in US telecom policy for roughly two decades, but the current wave is distinct because new fiber networks are being designed from the start as neutral, multi-tenant infrastructure, rather than relying on regulation to force incumbents to share existing lines.