Most of us take high-speed internet for granted. In fact, walk into a Starbucks or McDonald’s and it is available there for anyone to use. This is not the case for people living in rural areas in the United States or Indigenous areas in Canada, for example. In fact, according to the Federal Communications Commission, 22.3 percent of Americans in rural areas and 27.7 percent of Americans in tribal lands lack coverage from fixed terrestrial broadband. In Canada, an astounding 65.2 percent of First Nations reserves do not have access to universal service of 50 megabits per second download or 10 Mbps upload speeds.

This remains both a challenge and an opportunity for infrastructure investment. According to a McKinsey & Co. report titled Fiber Opportunity: Four Deal Types for Investors to Consider, in 2021, 94 deals were made for fiber assets, approximately 80 percent of which (75 deals) were for fiber-to-the-x (FTTX) networks — the term used to describe a range of network