Fibre to the Home slow growth in Europe

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) is pushing ahead in Asia with three countries seeing incursion of the service to more than 20% of households. These figures are striking, and help to illustrate how meager the deployment is here in Europe, with our region now only lately having reached a total of one million connections. By contrast, Japan now has 11 million subscribers.

The most fibre prominent area of Europe is Sweden with 7.1% of homes connected, followed by Norway with 6% and Denmark 2.1%. There were three new entrants to the list of countries that contain a FTTH penetration of more than 1% since July 2007 and these were Slovenia, Iceland and Singapore.

The Register have also exposed a fascinating fact that few FTTH deployments appears to be run by Telecom operators. Only France Telecom, Iliad (also French), Telekom Slovenia and Orange in Slovakia are foremost from the telecom sector with the majority of deployments being run by power utility companies or local authorities.

Where government gets involved, there is the capability to fashion a more open network, not owned by a single telecoms company, opening the opportunity of competition to be created in the local network instantly.

A report by IDATE details the current FTTH situation across Europe. Obviously, the UK gets little mention as there are no extensive plans for deployments. The government is taking note by looking into the future of our broadband connections and there are some projects in the pipeline, such as H2O’s fibre network via the sewers.