PETER DYKES EUROPEAN FTTH
FTTH IN EUROPE PATCHY, BUT GETTING BETTER
As the FTTH Conference Europe approaches, the state of FTTH across the continent is patchy. While some countries are forging ahead, others are just getting started, with governments and operators alike expressing high ambitions for the market. Peter Dykes looks at the current state of play.
A head of the much- anticipated release of already clear that 2018 was the year FTTH really took off in Europe, but it’s not the same story in every country. The big question this year will be if countries such as Latvia, which had a roughly 50% mix of FTTH and FTTB will continue to lead the table of European countries with the greatest fibre penetration. In February 2019, Mona Keijzer, Dutch State Secretary of Economic Affairs and Climate, and representatives from national broadband trade association NLconnect, the contractor GNT, and rural fibre network company Glasvezel buitenaf, announced that fibre optic connections in The Netherlands had reached three million (see page 4). Of the larger European countries, Spain was eighth overall in the Panorama with 33.9% household penetration, although this was the highest figure for pure FTTH anywhere in Europe. In January 2019, Spain’s MASMOVIL Group, the fourth largest telecommunications operator in Spain and claimed to have achieved a new commercial milestone by recently surpassing the total figure of 1 million fixed broadband customers. Of its total the FTTH Council’s FTTH penetration figures at the Amsterdam conference and expo in March, it is
across 22 English counties and currently covers over 65,000 homes and businesses, delivering 1Gbps FTTP to under-served communities. The UK government has stepped in with a call from the National Infrastructure Commission for greater investment in a digitally driven economy, meaning the noises coming from the Government have been positive. The vision is for full fibre connectivity for every business and home by 2033. While this pronouncement has largely been welcomed, some of the new FTTH providers have expressed a degree of caution. Evan Weinburg, co-founder and CEO of full-fibre infrastructure provider Truespeed, which is rolling out FTTH in the rural south West of England and is currently adding new customers at over 1,600 per month, welcomes the Government’s initiative but says, “Of course, the devil is in the detail. 2033 is in reality a very ambitious target, given the huge complexity involved in such a vast infrastructure overhaul. Speak to any FTTH provider across Europe right now and they too will acknowledge the huge challenges involved. This means the choices that come next are going to be critical in determining whether or not 2033 is a realistic goal or a literal pipedream.”
fixed broadband customers, close to 67% correspond to fibre optic customers, while, in terms of new additions, 83% are through FTTH technology. In France, which at the beginning of 2018 had less than 5% FTTH penetration, the picture is far more mixed, but with 1.9 million additional accesses in 2018, the number of active subscriptions reached 8.4 million at the end of 3Q18. Most of the growth coming from the increase in end-to-end fibre optic subscriptions. At the end of that quarter, the number of end-to-end fibre optic accesses reached 4.3 million lines, a growth rate of 1.4 million in a year. FTTH/P now accounts for nearly 15% of the French total broadband technology mix. At the other end of the scale, or to be more accurate off the bottom of the scale, the UK did not even make it on to FTTH Council’s Market Panorama for 2018. It is fair to say the UK FTTH market is characterised by ambition and promises, however there are independent infrastructure suppliers that rapidly rolling out FTTH in various regions of the country. While the major operators seem to be largely concentrating on urban areas, the independents are looking mainly at connecting under-served rural areas. For example, Gigaclear Networks has deployed a 100G transport network
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| ISSUE 16 | Q1 2019
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