Where fiber is actually being built right now

Fiber now passes just under half of US homes. The next stretch of construction is being shaped less by the big carriers than by federal money and a handful of aggressive overbuilders.

The $42.45 billion program

BEAD — Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment — allocates federal money to states to wire locations with no service at 100/20 or better. Every state's plan has now been approved and construction is under way in most of them.

The largest allocations went to Texas ($3.3B), California ($1.9B), Missouri ($1.7B), Michigan ($1.6B) and North Carolina ($1.5B). Those are also the states with the most unserved rural locations, which is the point.

Who is actually digging

• Frontier is the most aggressive of the incumbents, converting copper to fiber across 25 states.
• Brightspeed is doing the same across the Southeast on former CenturyLink territory.
• Metronet and Ziply are overbuilding mid-size cities that had only cable.
• Google Fiber resumed expansion after years of quiet, adding metros in Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and Arizona.
• Kinetic is wiring genuinely rural addresses in 17 states.

What it means for you

Two practical things. First, check availability again if you last looked more than a year ago — footprints are moving faster than at any point since the original cable build. Second, when a fiber overbuilder enters a market, the incumbent cable operator almost always cuts prices in response. If a new provider just turned up on your street, it is a good moment to call your current one.