Charter’s Enterprise Unit Earmarks $1B-Plus for Fiber Plan

Spectrum Enterprise, a unit of Charter Communications focuses on the large business services segment, said it will invest more than $1 billion in 2018 to increase the density of its national fiber network.

Charter said this will be the second straight year in which the company has invested in excess of $1 billion exclusively in Spectrum Enterprise, which will be looking to expand on a network of nearly 200,000 fiber-lit buildings.

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Spectrum Enterprise will absorb the bulk of the upfront costs of fiber construction for most new enterprise clients in its footprint for solutions such as Fiber Internet Access, Ethernet and voice trunks (SIP/PRI).

The investment will also come to add fiber density as wired networks become a significant backhaul channel for a coming wave of 5G-based services and other bandwidth-intensive offerings. 

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"As fiber connectivity has become fundamental to economic growth, we are focused on making our fiber infrastructure more accessible to clients, and reshaping their experience to align with the evolving realities of today’s modern enterprise," Phil Meeks, EVP and president of Spectrum Enterprise, said in a statement. "Advanced video and virtual reality solutions, cloud, IoT and the future of 5G all depend on a reliable and highly-dense fiber network. Our commitment is to ensure that our clients have the most robust fiber network and solutions to grow today and take advantage of future technologies that have immense demands on bandwidth."