LAS VEGAS--The number of North American homes connected directly to fiber has surpassed 1 million, according to a report released Thursday by Render Vanderslice & Associates.

At the end of September, 1,011,000 North American homes were fiber-fed. That represents a nearly 51% increase over the past six months and a 213% increase over the past year.

Fiber now passes more than 6 million North American homes and is being marketed to more than 5 million, the new report said.

The 213% annual growth rate shown in the new data makes North America the fastest growing market for fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) subscribers, said Michael Render, president of Render Vanderslice. In Japan, FTTP subscribers are growing 82% annually (though from a much larger base), and in Europe, they're growing 20% per year.

Much of the domestic growth is attributable to one company: Verizon Communications. At the end of June, Verizon reported having passed 4.4 million U.S. homes with fiber and to be marketing the service to 3.1 million of them. The company reported 375,000 customers for the service at that time.

Bell companies own nearly 64% of today's FTTP subscribers, Render said, followed by incumbent local exchange carriers, which own nearly 12%; competitive local exchange carriers, which own more than 9%; municipalities and public utilities, which own 7%; developers, which own nearly 7% and cable companies, which own less than 2%.

On average, FTTP users tend to spend one more day per month working at home than others (who spend about a third of a day per month). And they spend about $370 more on consumer electronics related to FTTP after they become subscribers.

FTTP users are also happier with their service than users of broadband architectures, Render said. Eighty-nine percent of FTTP users said they were very or somewhat satisfied, while only 63% of cable and DSL users and 30% of dial-up users said the same thing.

"And that's before we get into things like video conferencing," Render said. "This is only the beginning. We'll soon have full-motion video Web sites instead of the Model T versions we have today."