UPDATE UK Still Absent from 2015 Global Ultrafast FTTH Broadband Ranking

The FTTH Council Europe, which campaigns for the adoption of Fibre-to-the-Home (100Mbps+) ultrafast fibre optic broadband technology, has published its latest global ranking of FTTH/P/B progress and sadly, despite some good growth in the past year, the United Kingdom continues to be a no show.

At present most of the “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) coverage in the UK is being delivered via slower, but cheaper and quicker to deploy, hybrid-fibre technologies like BT’s ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) and Virgin Media’s 152Mbps cable (DOCSIS) network. Future upgrades like G.fast and DOCSIS3.1 should also squeeze a lot more speed out of those networks.

But others believe in an arguably much closer to future proof solution that adopts a pure fibre optic network, which can deliver reliable Gigabit level speeds (1000Mbps+). In most cases this approach is significantly more expensive and slower to deploy, although that hasn’t stopped a growing number of operators and countries from seeing the other benefits.

According to the FTTH Council’s latest ranking, the number of Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) and similar Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) subscribers in Europe has increased by around 50% over the past 12 months and there a now 14.5 million in total (excluding Russia and Ukraine which would add a further 14.8 million). The average FTTH/B/P penetration across the whole of the EU28 is now 5.6%.

Unfortunately you won’t find the United Kingdom in this list because apparently we don’t yet meet the current criteria, which would require us to show 1% household penetration (note: the council appears to reference this as subscriptions and not premises passed). The ranking itself is below and a more detailed copy can be downloaded here (sorry it’s not clearer below but the source image is quite poor).

Despite this it’s important to reflect that FTTH/P/B connectivity is picking up pace in the United Kingdom. Only this week Hyperoptic confirmed that they had passed 100,000 premises (the aim is 500,000 by 2018), while Openreach has also put over 160,000 premises within reach of FTTP and KC in Hull has passed 40,000. Lest we not also forget the big plans of CityFibre, Sky Broadband and TalkTalk or the contribution of smaller operators like Gigaclear, IFNL and B4RN etc.

All in all the UK should currently have well over 300,000 FTTH/P/B premises passed and the numbers appear to be growing at an increasingly rapid pace, although the majority of related deployments remain fairly niche.

In other words, progress is improving but the UK is unlikely to do much positive damage to the councils table unless one of the two major operators does a shock U-turn and that’s not likely to happen (both remain focused on cost effective hybrid-fibre upgrades).

UPDATE 24th Feb 2015

According to iDATE, the UK had 43,000 FTTH/P/B subscribers and 380,000 homes passed at the end of 2014 (we suspect that 380k figure includes a few business premises).