UK to Overtake Spain as Europe’s 2nd Largest FTTP Broadband Market in 2028
New research from telecoms analyst firm Point Topic has forecast that full fibre (FTTP) broadband subscribers in the 31 markets of Europe will reach 157.4 million by 2030 (up from 112.4m at the end of 2025), which reflects a 40.1% growth rate over five years (7% CARG). But the United Kingdom looks set to become one of the continent’s strongest markets, despite its late start to building at scale.
According to the study, France will remain the largest single market (31.7 million subscribers by 2030), but the UK is forecast to overtake Spain as the second-largest market in 2028, and to add more net subscribers than any other country over 2025–2030 (+10.9 million).
The rapid rate of subscriber growth reflects the fact that the UK is still playing catch-up on its roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) infrastructure, which in some cases didn’t start at scale until nearly a decade after some of the most mature markets in Europe. The flip side of this is that those mature markets have largely plateaued with their subscriber growth, while the UK still has a lot of headroom to expand.
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For example, the slowest FTTP subscriber growth (CAGR) is forecast for Iceland (+1.0%), Spain (+1.6%), Slovakia (+1.8%) and Romania (+2.0%) — markets already close to full coverage and high take-up. As one of Europe’s largest five major markets, it makes sense that the UK will eventually grow to be among the front-runners.
Otherwise, FTTP network coverage (homes passed as a share of households) across the 31 countries will increase from 76% in 2025 to 90.7% by 2030. The least-covered markets by 2030 will remain the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Belgium.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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That graph would be far more meaningful if it were subscriptions per 100,000 of population.
Well done to Openreach for being the prime mover behind this. 🙂
Whatever the issues that has been faced in the UK and the mistakes made which led to lost time, this is not a direct comparison given that in Spain a lot of the fibre has been “deployed” by nailing it onto the sides of buildings. And I am referring to the part before the CBTs. So, the difference in infrastructure impact in the two cases, vide cost, is massive.
There I was thinking the UK was way behind the rest of the world.
A reminder one street, village or town isn’t indicative of the whole nation. Between alternative networks and the very quick Openreach build we’ve been late to the game but catching up nicely. In both urban and rural areas.