According to a new study commissioned by the Fiber To The Home Council, as of March of this year, there's about 18.2 million homes passed with fiber to the home connections in North America. "Homes passed" is sometimes a flaky term that doesn't always mean fiber is available, and the study indicates that about 17 million of those users can actually get fiber to the home. Of those, the number of homes actually connected just passed roughly 5.8 million.

Of course the significant majority of those fiber connections are courtesy of Verizon, who is just wrapping up their $23 billion fiber to the home network build. Still, the study notes that there's roughly 750 other service providers across North America deploying fiber to the home -- and most of them are small privately-owned telcos or cooperatives.

"With Verizon approaching the end of its initial FiOS expansion, we are seeing a lot of small local exchange carriers in the U.S. who are ready to pick up the slack, along with some cable TV companies deploying RFoG and some larger Canadian companies going FTTH," said Joe Savage, President of the FTTH Council. The Council is stocked with fiber hardware vendors and carriers who obviously want this trend to continue.

"To continue to meet the rapidly growing bandwidth requirements for emerging applications and services, these companies know that they have to 'future-proof' their networks by running fiber all the way to the premises - and that's why we are seeing all this activity," he added. Of course there's also a significant number of public telcos who plan to nurse copper over the next decade -- given that many investors don't like paying for network upgrades.

Still, we're making steady but slow progress anyway. FTTH has now reached almost 16% penetration of U.S. households in terms of homes passed -- and 5% in terms of homes connected according to the study. The study's author, Mike Render, insists that once a fiber network is built, take rates among consumers averages "above 50 percent."