FTTH Council says UK is way behind in 100Mbps broadband rollout

  • June 9, 2010

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) based superfast broadband connections worldwide have reached over 41m in 2009, up by more than 16% in last six months, according to the recent IDATA report.

Expected to hit 52 million mark this year, Fibre to the Home (FTTH) broadband can deliver standard speeds of up to 100Mbps and has been deployed on faster phase, mainly, in far East countries like South Korea and Japan, in the USA and in European nations like Sweden, Italy and France.

Japan and South Korea are the top two nations with 17.1m and 9.2m FTTH lines respectively, while the USA, with 5.7m connections, comes in 3rd on the top ten table.

Among other top fibre nations, Sweden has over 5.3m FTTH customers, followed by Italy (3.2m) and France (3m).

The study has also revealed that Fibre to the Home broadband uptake will continue to rise in these and other nations in the next five years. It has been estimated that FTTH networks will connect nearly 306 million homes worldwide by 2014,. Asia Pacific region which dominates the fibre optic broadband market will account for more than half of the global subscribers while one in five subscribers will be in Europe, the research shows.

broadband cable

In Europe, there are other nations like Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Slovenia which have more ultra-fast fibre connections than the UK, the recent report from FTTH council Europe shows.

With less than 5000 fibre subscribers when comparing to 5.3 million fibre broadband enabled homes in Sweden, the UK is way behind, when it comes to next generation access, according to Chris Holden, President of the FTTH Council.

FTTH penetration rate in UK will be the slowest among the European nations, the latest report from the research firm Heavy Reading shows.

By 2020, one in five broadband users in UK will be able to access FTTH, however, other European nations like Germany, France and Italy will adopt to this ultra-fast broadband technology at faster rate and reach this minimum target a couple of years earlier, according to its findings.

The UK which had over 18,233,000 fixed broadband connections by the end of 2009, is expected to hit 25 million mark in the next five years, an analyst firm has predicted. There will be over 12 million homes in UK that will access fibre broadband (FTTx) by 2016, according to its forecast.