World Broadband Lines Top 1.5bn as UK Full Fibre Grows 11.7 Percent in Q4 2024
New research from Point Topic has revealed that global fixed broadband lines grew by 0.91% or 13.5 million in Q4 2024 (down from 1.44% in Q3 2024) to total 1.5 billion connections. The subscriber growth rate of “full fibre” (FTTP/B) networks also remained strong in the UK at 11.7%, putting us just two places behind the leading countries for growth.
Once again South and East Asia has continued to claim the largest share of global fixed broadband subscribers, having increased it slightly in Q4 2024 to 50.99% (they also accounted for 54.62% of all new lines added in the quarter), which is mainly due to China’s huge size. By comparison, the whole of Europe (inc. UK) only accounted for 17.61% of overall subscribers and 9.49% of quarterly net adds.
The data also confirms that, overall, both cable (hybrid fibre coax) and copper (ADSL, SDSL) based broadband connections continued to lose market share as full fibre lines cannibalised their customers. Between Q3 2024 and Q4 2024, copper-based broadband lines lost -0.21% of their market share, while cable lost -0.12% and even hybrid-fibre (FTTC, G.fast) lost -0.14%. At the same time, FTTP/B (FTTH) grew by +0.28%.
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Put another way, full fibre broadband lines now account for 71.49% of the global market, while cable (coax) holds 14.03%, hybrid fibre is on 6.30%, copper sits with 5.04%, fixed wireless technologies have 2.33% and satellite-based broadband solutions are on 0.44%. Both satellite and wireless broadband services also saw a little bit of quarterly growth (0.07% and 0.13% respectively).
The good news is that the United Kingdom continues to perform well for country-specific quarterly growth of FTTP/B subscribers in Q4 2024, which is despite recent slowdowns in build due to rising costs and competition. In Egypt, Venezuela, the UK, Greece and Algeria, the study recorded FTTP/B quarterly growth rates of more than 10%. Some 29% of all fixed broadband connections in the UK are now FTTP/B based.
Top Ten Countries for FTTP/B Subscriber Growth (Q4 2024)
Egypt 21.2%
Venezuela 11.9%
UK 11.7%
Greece 11.2%
Algeria 10.5%
Belgium 9.9%
Peru 8%
Kenya 7.2%
Pakistan 6.6%
Ireland 6.1%
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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