BOSTON, MA — AT&T retains the number one rank for fiber lit buildings for the fourth year in a row, according to Vertical Systems Group's 2019 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD, the industry's annual benchmark for measuring business fiber market leadership. Provider rankings are based on shares of fiber lit commercial buildings.

The 2020 results ranked in order by number of on-net fiber lit buildings:

AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, CenturyLink, Comcast, Cox, Crown Castle Fiber, Frontier, Zayo, Altice USA, Atlantic Broadband, Windstream and Consolidated Communications (which gained more on-net fiber after buying FairPoint), and ABB is rising. These thirteen retail and wholesale fiber providers qualify for this benchmark with 10,000 or more on-net U.S. fiber lit commercial buildings as of year-end 2019.

Additionally, twelve companies qualify for the 2019 Challenge Tier as follows (in alphabetical order):

Cincinnati Bell, Cleareon, Cogent, Conterra, DQE Communications, Everstream, FirstLight, IFN, Logix Fiber Networks, Segra, Unite Private Networks, and Uniti Fiber.

These fiber providers each qualify for the 2019 Challenge Tier with between 2,000 and 9,999 U.S. fiber lit commercial buildings.

"The number of on-net fiber lit commercial buildings exceeded one million in 2019 as network providers concentrated on U.S. footprint expansion. New fiber deployments are providing dedicated access to network services, connecting 5G small cells, enabling low latency for edge computing, and supporting the massive bandwidth surge for webscale companies," said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group. "Our 2020 outlook is that while essential fiber deployments will proceed, some planned installations will be adjusted due to unanticipated capacity demands caused by the coronavirus crisis."