James Henry, senior managing director at Bank Street Group, said around 90% of this year’s deals by volume, and roughly 99% by transaction value, involved strategic rather than financial buyers. He expects consolidation to accelerate further, describing the market as increasingly “barbell” shaped, with very large transactions worth more than $10bn at one end and a long tail of small and mid-sized independent fibre operators at the other.
The panel, titled “Fiber investment: what does it take to win in the fiber market?” and chaired by Kemal Hawa, partner at Kirkland & Ellis, also included Ariana Batori, principal for credit at Stonepeak; Chad Crank, managing director at Grain Management; and Kirill Kozyar, AVP at RBC. The session followed a run of significant 2026 fibre transactions, including deals involving Frontier, Verizon, Bluebird Fiber and Everstream, attributed by the session’s framing to lower costs of capital, a more permissive M&A environment and lower asset multiples.
Crank opened by cautioning against treating fibre as a single market, arguing it spans distinct business models including residential fibre-to-the-home, enterprise fibre, long-haul wholesale, tower connectivity and subsea, each with different customer bases, risk profiles and underlying economics.
Henry said the US fibre-to-the-home opportunity remains sizeable. Of an estimated 150 million US households, he put current fibre passings at around 80 million, with the industry building roughly 10 million new passings annually, a figure broadly in line with independent fibre industry tracking. Enterprise fibre, by contrast, represents a roughly $80bn annual US spend market that is not growing significantly, while fibre built specifically to connect data centres is being driven by surging AI-related demand.
On financing, Batori described securitisation as the point at which mature fibre businesses “graduate” from bank and specialist lending, noting Stonepeak typically finances companies earlier in their growth, including during transitions from fixed wireless access to full fibre operations. Crank said Grain Management has not yet completed a securitisation across its portfolio, citing concerns about the leverage constraints the structure can impose during market cycles, though he did not rule one out.
Henry said asset-backed securities financing now allows fibre-to-the-home businesses to borrow roughly ten times net cash flow, worth an estimated $6,500 to $7,500 per retail subscriber.
On valuation, Henry said fibre-to-the-home assets are currently trading at roughly $3,000 to $3,500 per home passed and $10,000 to $12,000 per subscriber, translating to EBITDA multiples in the mid-to-high teens. He said enterprise fibre, which faced headwinds including office vacancy and soft carrier spending in recent years, could also command teens multiples as more operators bring assets to market. Fibre businesses built specifically to connect data centres, he said, are trading closer to 25 to 35 times EBITDA given long-term, investment-grade tenant contracts.
Kozyar put fibre-to-the-home multiples, depending on penetration maturity, at high single digits to around 10 times EBITDA, citing a recent Frontier transaction as a reference point.
Panellists broadly agreed that rising construction costs, driven by wage inflation, materials and higher capital costs, have shifted the economics of build-versus-buy in favour of acquisitions. Henry said the cost of building fibre-to-the-home networks organically has increased well beyond the $700 to $1,000 per home passed historically cited, making existing assets comparatively more valuable, particularly where conduit or easement access is scarce.
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