Consultancy firm IDATA reports that there were 41 million Fibre-to-the-Home / Building ( FTTH / B ) "Ultra Broadband" internet subscribers worldwide in 2009, which is expected to reach 52 million this year. FTTH uses fibre optic cable lines to deliver symmetrical broadband speeds of 100Mbps and possibly faster in the future.

Over the next five years, this momentum is likely to translate into a significant increase in the number of homes passed. Indeed, by the end of 2014, there will be close to 306 million homes passed for FTTH/B around the globe, of which more than half will still be located in Asia and 18% in Western Europe.


On the matter of subscribers, Eastern Europe, which has already pulled ahead of Western Europe, with 3.5m FTTH/B customers, compared to around 2m in the West, is forecast to have an even bigger subscriber base than North America in 2012. But you won't see the UK anywhere on the table due to our currently tiny FTTH footprint.

Some countries in this part of the world, such as Lithuania, have a particularly dynamic market and, in addition to swift and vast rollouts, are managing to persuade the eligible households to subscribe to ultra high-speed access offers.

Elsewhere, and especially in Asia, marketing the services has become a primary concern, since coverage rates have already reached the saturation point in the most advanced markets. HKBN in Hong Kong is the operator marketing the most competitively priced offer of anywhere in the world: 1Gbps for £18 (26 USD) a month!


It's worth pointing out that China's subscriber total rises from 710,000 to nearly 18 million when you include the countries FTTx +LAN users. Similarly the global total jumps to 63 million when VDSL (e.g. 40Mbps BT FTTC in the UK), FTTLA and FTTx+LAN are included. These are often left out of totals because they are not considered to be "true" fully fibre optic or next generation access services, due in part to their reliance on old infrastructure.