UPDATE UK Still Absent on World Ultrafast FTTH Broadband Ranking

The FTTH Council Europe, which campaigns for the adoption of ultrafast Gigabit (1000Mbps+) capable Fibre-to-the-Home broadband technology, has published its latest global ranking of FTTH/P/B progress and unsurprisingly the United Kingdom still doesn’t even make it to the list.

Mind you it’s important to stress that a growing number of operators are deploying ultrafast FTTH/P services in the United Kingdom, with BT (Openreach) having already covered (premises passed) around 200,000 Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) lines and KC in Hull aiming to reach 105,000 premises by March 2017.

Elsewhere B4RN has also connected 1,600+ to FTTH/P in rural Lancashire and Gigaclear could cover 40,000 by the end of 2016 or possibly 80,000 a little further down the road. On top of that you also have Hyperoptic, plus various joint and independent developments from Cityfibre, TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and many smaller operators. Lest we not forget that Virgin Media are doing a little FTTP via Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG).

Overall we’d guesstimate that there are currently over 400,000 premises passed in the UK with FTTH/P networks and this figure rises dramatically if you use the more hypothetical “addressable market” term that Cityfibre enjoys, but in our view that is a poor gauge for actual real-world coverage.

At this point you might thus be wondering why the UK does not appear on the FTTH Council’s ranking and that’s simply because their table is based upon market penetration, where generally you need to have a certain proportion of homes subscribing to the service in order to be included and we’re not quite there yet.

The good news is that UK FTTH/P coverage looks set to continue rising and at an increasingly rapid pace over at least the next few years, provided Ofcom doesn’t do something in their Strategic Review to screw that up. But we might still have to wait a little while longer before the FTTH Council shows us in their ranking and when they do we’ll be coming in at the bottom.

The main reason for that is of course because the most dominant two telecoms operators (in terms of infrastructure) – BT and Virgin Media – tend to prefer slower hybrid-fibre technologies like FTTC, G.fast and DOCSIS that usually adopt a mix of fibre optic, copper and coaxial cables to deliver their services. This is cheaper and faster to deploy than FTTH/P, but delivers slower speeds and often requires more maintenance over the longer term. The FTTH Council does not include these methods as they are not pure fibre optic lines.

UPDATE 18th Feb 2016:

Some extra details have just come in. At end-September 2015, there were more than 17.9 million FTTH/B subscribers on the European continent, excluding CIS countries (namely Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine). After Russia, which counts more than 15 million subscribers, the other largest markets in absolute figures are Spain (reaching 2.6 million subscribers with 65% growth rate over nine months), France (2.4 million subscribers with 31% growth) and Romania (2.3 million subscribers).

Three new economies have now entered the FTTH Ranking: Croatia, Germany and Poland. The deployment of FTTH in these countries was led by initiatives by both private operators and policy makers. For example, in Germany fibre projects led by municipalities coupled with private players had a great impact on fibre rollout in the country.

In terms of penetration, while Lithuania is still number one in the ranking with a penetration rate of 36.8%, Latvia (36.2%) and Sweden (35.2%) have made impressive progress. Both countries are now nearing lead position after greatly increasing their penetration rate since end-December 2014. They are not the only countries racing forward.

Luxembourg’s penetration rate gained almost three points from 11.2% at end-December 2014 to 14.1% at end-September 2015. The high-level engagement and support of politicians, along with the involvement of incumbent operator POST and other stakeholders, explain the significant rise in penetration.