FTTH Council Criticises Poor Superfast Broadband Progress in Europe

The FTTH Council Europe, which campaigns for the adoption of a fully fibre optic telecoms and internet infrastructure, has heavily criticised Europe’s “lacklustre performance” after a recent progress update showed that the EU was still a long way from achieving their Digital Agenda targets for superfast broadband.

The most recent scorecard revealed that Europe was close to achieving its first Digital Agenda target for 100% coverage of basic broadband services (0.5-4Mbps) by the end of 2013. But the target to make superfast broadband (30Mbps+) speeds available to 100% of EU homes by 2020 (with 50% able to access 100Mbps+) had only improved slightly from 49% last year to 54% now (here).

The council also argues that, while ultrafast 100Mbps+ Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) technology is the dominant network deployment in the US, Europe’s fast broadband networks are dominated by “upgraded copper” (FTTC) that is “more limited by speed and distance“. Naturally the council would rather billions more was spent to do a true FTTH platform.

Hartwig Tauber, Director General of the FTTH Council Europe, said:

“European policy makes no distinction between the regulatory regime for low cost copper upgrades and more expensive but future-proof fibre to the home investments. The result is that regulatory policies effectively promote copper upgrades. Prioritising copper upgrades and making the pricing regime for copper a central element of the Single Market reforms shows a lack of vision that does not augur well for Europe. We need a greater emphasis on future-proof fibre networks and need to facilitate new models of financing.”

In fairness a number of recent EU regulatory proposals and changes have actually moved to encourage the adoption of truly fibre optic infrastructure. But this is only part of the story because there’s also the issue of investment to consider.

The council claims that an investment of around €200 billion would be needed to deliver FTTH across the whole of the EU. This is all very well except, during times of such austerity, there unfortunately appears to be little interest in funnelling extra money into such schemes.

The evidence for this was sadly plain for all to see in February 2013 when the EU’s seven-year budget (2014 to 2020) was cut by 3% to around £768bn. One significant casualty of this was nearly all of the €9.2bn (£7.78bn) Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) that had been set aside to support broadband infrastructure development (here). If they can’t even find a few billion to do a mixed approach then FTTH doesn’t stand much of a chance.

The council also said that a “second area of concern” was the lack of take-up for “ultrafast” broadband services, which noted that the proportion of Europeans subscribing to speeds of 100Mbps+ stood at just 2%. “Europe needs to develop services for consumers that meet the needs of those consumers … the public sector can lead the way in public service delivery,” said Karin Ahl, President of the FTTH Council Europe. On the other hand many people might not see the need for 100Mbps+ speeds but that’s only today and tomorrow will be a different story.

Most of the related work and decisions have now been left up to individual member states. In countries like the United Kingdom we’re unlikely to see a true FTTH network due to the existence of a massive copper and coax cable infrastructure.

BT are currently looking to use a mix of enhanced FTTC (Vectoring) and future G.Fast / FTTdp technologies that could potentially make speeds of 100Mbps+ available to a much larger number of UK people without adopting FTTH; but some of these are still a long way off. Meanwhile Virgin Media can already offer 100Mbps to roughly half of the country.