The FTTH Council Europe, which campaigns for the adoption of pure fibre optic based Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P/B) style ultrafast broadband technologies, has published their latest 2018 country ranking and sadly the United Kingdom remains notable for its continued absence.
Coverage figures for the UK tend to vary but we’ve previously estimated that “full fibre” style FTTH/P/B broadband networks were already available to around 1.1 million homes and businesses (premises passed) by mid-2017 (here), which is now rising at an increasingly rapid pace.
At this point you’d be forgiven for wondering why the UK does not appear on the Council’s ranking and that’s partly 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 (apparently we’re not quite there yet). It’s also possible that the council may be lacking a complete picture of the UK’s FTTH/P/B market.
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Overall the number of Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) and Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) subscribers in Europe increased by 20.4% since September 2016, reaching 51.6 million subscribers in the EU39. Coverage (homes passed) also increased by 16% to reach more than 148 million across the same area and take-up grew to 34.8% (up from 29.9% in the previous year).
The ranking also reveals that FTTH is more popular than FTTB (55% vs 45% by September 2017) and more alternative network ISPs (AltNets) are deploying than incumbents, with a contribution of about 54% of the total. In an FTTB setup the operator usually takes their fibre optic cable to a building but the service may then be distributed internally via a very short run of either fibre, coax or other copper lines (Gigabit speeds are still possible).
Ronan Kelly, President of the FTTH Council, said:
“The findings of the Market Panorama are quite telling, we are now all looking towards the same goal of a fibre rich Gigabit society.
We obviously commend the front-runners for their impressive and continuous progress towards FTTH/B but we are also very encouraged by the new trend of operators in countries which do not typically demonstrate a strong appetite for fibre, starting to get involved more intensively in FTTH/B projects.
The structure of the market is also changing with the apparition of new types of stakeholders with innovative business models fostering infrastructure competition and making new investments.”
The good news is that FTTP/H/B coverage in the UK is now going through a significant ramping-up phase. In recent months Openreach (here), Vodafone and Cityfibre (here), Hyperoptic (here) and TalkTalk (here) have all announced significant plans to build their own “full fibre” networks to millions of premises, albeit mostly in urban areas (it’s too early to say how much these will overlap).
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On top of that a variety of smaller alternative network providers, such as Gigaclear, KCOM, Community Fibre and B4RN, are also continuing to grow and some of these are more rural than urban focused. Lest we forget Virgin Media’s on-going expansion to 2 million extra premises via FTTP (note: an additional 2 million are being catered for via Hybrid Fibre Coax based DOCSIS).
The Government is helping to fuel some of this via their £400m (state aid) Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund (DIFF), which when supported by private investment could be worth up to £1.5bn. Over the next 3-4 years the DIFF could help an additional 2 million premises to gain access to ultrafast broadband (full details). The Chancellor is also working to introduce a 5 year relief from business rates on new fibre (details).
In short, this might very well be the last year that the UK is absent from the Council’s ranking but our market will continue to be dominated by cheaper hybrid fibre solutions (e.g. FTTC VDSL / G.fast and Cable DOCSIS) for quite a few years to come. Now here’s a snapshot of the wider global ranking.
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NOTE: Spain, which is playing host to the event, has so far delivered 17.5 Million homes passed by FTTH/B and 6 Million subscribers by September 2017. The country also scores high on the global ranking with a penetration rate of 33.9% and its deployment is a lot younger than some.
However countries like Spain should not be directly compared with the UK because, for example, dramatically more people live in large apartment buildings over there (cheaper to serve) and Telefonica (Spanish incumbent) didn’t have to wholesale FTTP until recently (it still doesn’t have to do so in more competitive areas).
UPDATE 9:11am
The UK might not show up on the council’s official ranking table for the EU39 but the organisation has also published some general growth statistics as part of today’s speech and if you look down at the bottom right corner, while making sure to squint your eyes in mild irritation.. At least we have growth on our side.
UPDATE 9:38am
The full slides package (PDF) has now been published, which includes a bit of extra background.
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