Lance van der Spuy has a way of framing the US fiber opportunity that stops you mid-conversation. As President of Ripple Fiber, a company that has grown from 13 employees to a 10-state operator in just a few years, he's spent a lot of time thinking about what fiber internet customers actually want. His answer is not what most people in the industry say.
"They see it as a service subscription, rather than a utility."
It sounds simple. But the implications are significant, and they explain a lot about how Ripple has built its business.
The number that matters
Before getting into how Ripple operates, it helps to understand what every fiber operator is ultimately racing toward: penetration. Once a network is built, the clock starts. The capital has gone into the ground, and the return on that investment depends entirely on how quickly you can get paying customers onto it. For Ripple, the target is around 50% penetration in each market pocket, typically 60 to 100 homes brought live at a time. Everything else, the communications, the installation experience, the brand promise, is in service of reaching that number as fast as possible, and then holding and building on it.
That context makes the SaaS framing more than a philosophy. It's a commercial strategy.
The cable hangover
American broadband customers have a long memory. Years of price hikes, missed appointments, and indifferent customer service from incumbent cable providers have left a large portion of the market not just ready to switch, but actively looking for a reason to. When fiber shows up in their neighborhood, they're not comparing speeds on a spec sheet. They're asking a different question: will this company treat me better?
van der Spuy is direct about where the real opportunity lies, and it's not where a CFO might be expected to look first.
"Reducing the order-to-cash cycle matters, but in fiber to the home it's really the customer experience that's most important. These customers have been abused for so many years by cable operators, that's been the only game in town. They're not switching just because fiber is a better technology. They're tired of being messed around, tired of no communication, prices being jacked up, speeds lagging. They're looking for something different, an exceptional service experience. Even though it's seen as a utility, they think of it more like their Netflix subscription. The big question is, how do you delight that customer? And the answer is better communication, meeting timelines and expectations, and packaging that as a complete solution."
That framing has direct implications for where the platform creates the most value. Every friction point in the customer journey, a missed appointment, a late confirmation, a billing error on day one, is a reason for a potential subscriber to stay with cable. Every moment of delight is a reason to convert sooner. Ripple's response has been to build its operations from the ground up to deliver that experience through automation and data, rather than hoping the right person remembered to make a call.
Lessons from markets that got there first
One of Ripple's less obvious advantages is where its founding team learned its trade. Fiber rollouts in South Africa and the UK preceded those in the US market by several years, and the penetration curves, customer behaviors, and operational challenges proved remarkably similar. That experience meant Ripple could move faster and make fewer expensive mistakes than operators building from scratch.
It also meant the team had a clear view of which operational software actually worked at the scale they were targeting. AEX OSS/BSS, the dominant platform in South Africa with more than three million customers globally, was a known quantity before Ripple ran its first cable in Charlotte. Adopting it from day one, on a per-subscriber commercial model that grows with the business rather than front-loading costs, gave the company an operational foundation that most early-stage operators spend years trying to build.
Construction is your best sales moment
One of the more counterintuitive insights van der Spuy shared was about the relationship between construction disruption and customer conversion. You might expect that tearing up streets and managing community relations would be purely a cost. Ripple has learned something different.
"The construction phase is very disruptive, but it's also the best time to engage your potential customers, because they're intrigued. They're trying to understand what's happening. You get to engage and explain what Ripple Fiber is and why fiber is better than cable," said van der Spuy.
When diggers show up in a neighborhood, residents want to know what's happening. That curiosity opens a door. The operators who show up with good answers and who make it easy to pre-register or ask questions tend to see better early take-up than those who let the construction speak for itself. Ripple has learned to treat the build phase as a sales and engagement opportunity, not just a logistics challenge. Getting those early conversions locked in before the network even goes live is one of the most effective ways to accelerate toward that 50% penetration target.
There's a timing nuance to pre-orders, too. Go too early, and customers sign up, forget, and feel annoyed when you finally call six months later to book an installation. Leave it too late, and you miss the conversion window when interest is highest. Ripple has developed a sense for when the moment is right: when construction is confirmed, permits are in hand, and a timeline can actually be committed to. Done well, it means the first wave of activations happens almost immediately when the network goes live, rather than weeks or months later.
The fiber vs cable education problem
There's a broader challenge facing the whole industry that van der Spuy is refreshingly candid about. Unlike in the UK, where many consumers were actively demanding fiber and pulling providers into their communities, US consumers are still largely being educated about why fiber is better than cable.
"On average, the consumer doesn't really understand the benefits of fiber over cable, so we're having to do more grassroots education, which just makes the sales cycle slightly longer."
Cable's "good enough" positioning has done its job. For many households, the pain hasn't been acute enough to force a change. Which means fiber operators can't just show up and expect the market to come to them. A longer sales cycle is a slower penetration curve, and a slower penetration curve is a slower return on a very large capital investment. The operators who close that gap fastest, through better education, better timing, and a genuinely better customer experience, win.
What this means for operators
The thread running through all of this is that the operational and the commercial are inseparable. The platform that manages your scheduling also shapes your customers' first impression. The reporting that tracks technician performance is the same data used to protect your service promise. The billing automation that closes the loop is what makes the subscription feel like a subscription. And all of it, ultimately, is what gets you to 50% penetration faster than your previous assumptions said was possible.
Ripple's story, told in full in our case study, is a practical demonstration of what it looks like when a fiber operator commits to that idea from day one. Not a utility. A service people are glad they chose.
AEX OSS/BSS and AEX Field Squared are both part of AEX One, a unified end-to-end platform built for fiber operators. Find out more at aexsoftware.com.