FROM THE INDUSTRY
That varies a lot across the continent though. Of course, it’s not the same everywhere. Spain is the poster child: 92% fibre to the home and the take-up rate is 86%. For those countries with high coverage of fibre to the home, they actually also have high take-up rates. So if you look at Spain, France, some of the Nordic countries, their take-up rates are in the 70s and 80%. That should be encouraging to investors – evidently once people have fibre to their home, they will start to use it. True, but there are pockets of places where the rollout is at a lower rate, if you like. Somewhere like the UK or Germany have lower rates, not because they have no broadband but because they only have fibre to the cabinet. However, in the UK, 4.7 million homes were passed in 2020 between 2022 and ‘23. And Germany? Germany doesn’t have that much fibre to the home, but 4.4 million homes passed between ‘22 and ‘23. These are pretty large numbers, so I think what I would say is the outlook is pretty positive, because it says people want fibre to their home, that even places that don’t have strong rollouts, large coverage today, are actually doing rollouts at a pretty impressive rate. Once people have fibre to the home, they are adopting.
Congratulations Roshene, you must be delighted. You have been quite clear about what you’re prioritising as President, one of which is incentivising investors. How do you plan to do that? We look very closely at the health of the markets in order to finance the Fibre to the Home rollout plans. Regulation helps with that, so we are making sure that the barriers to rollout are reduced. Copper switch off is a way of accelerating adoption, especially in locations where we may have fibre to the cabinet, but we haven’t got quite got fibre to the home yet. FTTH Council can really help in advocating for this; the copper switch off offers a lot of advantages, especially on carbon footprint. Fibre to the home networks are more energy efficient than copper networks. There’s still confusion amongst the general public; people think they have fibre to the home when they haven’t. Obviously, it’s not been legislated for, but for many years FTTH Council has been providing education on what does fibre to the home actually mean, and it’s not fibre to the cabinet. How do you see things progressing in the next 12, 24 months? We publish a market panorama every year. It’s a hotly anticipated piece of collateral. People are waiting for the panorama to come out so they can see where we’re at. It’s really helpful. 70% of Europe is covered with high-speed, fibre to the home broadband; on average, there’s about a 50% take-up rate of those services.
Tell me about where the FTTH Council is on rural broadband.
What do we do with that kind of last 10%, that last hard to reach community? Connecting those more isolated communities can bring real, tangible benefits to families in those areas in terms of education, entertainment and health. There are real drivers to get this fibre into rural communities, but it is going to take government initiatives and regulatory support in order to get them there, because the business case doesn’t always stack up in these harder to reach places.
DECEMBER 2024 Volume 46 No.4
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