UK Trails as 10 Countries Pass 95 Percent Full Fibre Broadband Cover

A new report from global consultancy firm Arthur D. Little has revealed that 10 countries have now made “full fibre” (FTTP / FTTB) broadband ISP networks available to at least 95% of homes, although unsurprisingly the United Kingdom continues to be stuck at the back of the pack but we are showing rapid improvement.

The report itself – ‘The race to gigabit fiber‘ (yes that should be “fibre,” but they can’t help being American) – doesn’t really add anything new to the debate that we haven’t already covered before (examples here, here, here and here), but it does help to put the UK’s position into a more up-to-date context with some of the world’s other major markets for gigabit-capable fibre connectivity.

Overall, the United Kingdom is shown to have improve its FTTP/B coverage from 1% in 2012 to 12% at the end of 2019 (this seems to be roughly aligned with Ofcom’s data), with some 2% of households now being connected to such a service. Sadly, these figures put us right at the bottom of the table, but again we already knew that from past reports.

The key thing to remember here is that deployments over the past couple of years have been ramping up significantly as a result of various changes, such as the business rates holiday on new fibre, various regulatory changes by Ofcom (e.g. easier access to Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles), public investment (BDUK, voucher schemes etc.) and a large influx of private investment for alternative networks that has driven competition (e.g. BT’s £12bn plan to cover 20 million premises after 2025).

The Government’s future programme to invest a further £5bn (focused on the final 20% of hardest to reach premises), which aims to ensure that “every home” can access “gigabit-capable” broadband by the end of 2025 (though this may be watered down), will no doubt help to further accelerate the UK’s fibre build. We should add that this is being support by various other changes (e.g. gigabit broadband for new build homes and opening up access to utilities infrastructure for sharing etc.).

Nevertheless, we are still stuck playing a long game of catch-up and nothing is going to change that reality for a while, but at least things are finally going in the right direction.

Arthur D. Little’s Report said:

“In almost all fiber-leading markets, the incumbent has taken a principal role in rolling out nationwide fiber. However, in an increasing number of European countries, alternative operators or new open access fiber entrants have secured billions of euros to deliver promised nationwide fiber coverage in the next four to six years, potentially becoming new future fiber leaders in their respective markets. Such entities include, for example, Open Fiber in Italy, CityFibre in the UK, Swiss Open Fiber in Switzerland and Deutsche Glasfaser and inexio in Germany.

In the case of Germany, the two alternative providers, Deutsche Glasfaser and inexio, which target mostly rural and underserved suburban areas, have announced plans to deploy fiber to approximately 8 million additional homes by 2030, moving the coverage from a current 11 percent up to approximately 28 percent. Saudi Arabia is also betting on boosting its FTTH performance by launching a new open access initiative in cooperation with all operators in the market.

The take-up rates of fiber services have increased in line with the improved coverage, driven by effective migration strategies. Since 2012, the average take-up rate has grown from 15 percent to 42 percent among the benchmark countries.

The report also shows how competition in the full fibre market will ultimately fuel the emergence of even faster multi-gigabit broadband packages for homes. We’ve already seen some ISPs like Black Fibre (Telcom) and B4RN launch a 10Gbps tier in the UK, while Zzoomm also has a 2Gbps service, although these are currently the exception rather than the rule, due to their limited coverage.

However, for other markets with better coverage, multi-gigabit packages for consumers are becoming much more common and some are surprisingly affordable. Admittedly there’s still a big question mark over how much of that advertised speed is actually available (not all markets have the same strict advertising rules as we do) and the difficulty of harnessing such speeds in the real-world, but such things often mean very little in the marketing game.

However, in the majority of markets, multi-gigabit tariffs are still considered a luxury that demands a premium. In some cases, the premium is almost prohibitive. Ooredoo in Qatar charges approximately €1,600/month for its 10Gbps plan.. we’ll pass on that, thanks.

All of this talk about gigabit speeds and full fibre will of course be extremely galling to those still stuck living in locations where even getting 10Mbps+ remains prohibitively expensive. Likewise, it remains to be seen whether the Government’s latest £5bn programme will finally be able to resolve those problems or become another failure to deliver.