Fiber Is a Good Long-Term Bet, Says Former FCC Chairman Pai

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2025 – Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is bullish on fiber as a long-term investment, he said Wednesday.

“There’s been the rise of an entire pocket of private capital, infrastructure capital that has a much lower rate of return expectation, and also a much longer time horizon,” he said. “People have come around to viewing this as a sort of core infrastructure, which is not how they viewed broadband at all, from a private equity perspective at least, 10 or 20 years ago.”

Pai is a partner at Searchight Capital, which closed a $3.1 billion deal to buy Consolidated Communications last year. He spoke at a Fiber Broadband Association webinar. Consolidated had nearly 250,000 fiber subscribers in the last numbers it reported before being taken private.

The large wireless carriers are also of course racing to expand their fiber footprints, either by building out themselves or buying up regional providers. AT&T is planning to hit 50 million passings by 2030 and Verizon is aiming for as many as 40 million “over time.”

He noted there’s something of a gap between how private capital sees investing in fiber and how some lawmakers in Washington appear to see it. Republican leadership in the Senate has been critical of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program’s preference for fiber, citing high upfront costs to reach the more remote locations targeted by the program. Other recent grants awarded at by state-level offices have heavily fearured fiber, telecom consultant Doug Dawson noted in his blog Monday.

Pai chalked some of that up to the slow roll out of BEAD, which was stood up by the Infrastructure Act in 2021 and is just now on the cusp of funding projects. Fiber is higher capacity but takes longer to deploy than other technologies like fixed wireless.

“Cumbersome processes, regulatory requirements, and whatever other factors people might identify have stood in the way of BEAD funding getting out there,” he said.

The program was aimed at connecting every home and business without adequate broadband, and the mapping and planning process was set up to be more involved than past grant programs. States did report some back and forth with the federal government, which had to greenlight implementation plans and post-challenge broadband coverage data.

Three states received approval to move forward with their spending plans in the final days of the Biden administration. It’s unclear how wide-ranging policy changes will be under the Trump administration, or if they would materially change the portion of money going to non-fiber projects.