The FTTH Council Europe, which seeks to foster a sustainable future enabled by superfast 100Mbps+ Fibre to the Home ( FTTH ) fibre optic broadband connections, has revealed that related internet connections within Europe have increased by 22% over the past six months.

In absolute numbers, Europe has reached 3.2 million FTTH/B subscribers (nearly 4.5 million including Russia). And network deployment continues to bring fibre within reach of more homes: Europe now counts 18 million FTTH/B homes passed (more than 26 million including Russia), a growth of more than 6% during the first half of 2010.

As usual the UK is nowhere to be found in all of this, although that should begin to change once the commercial deployment of BT's new 110Mbps FTTP / FTTH service gets underway next year. It's worth noting that the FTTH Council is rather limited in its scope and doesn't consider other methods that deliver broadband at similar speeds, such as wireless solutions or Virgin Media UK's 100Mbps package.


The FTTH Ranking now includes 17 countries in Europe where more than 1% of households subscribe to broadband over a direct fibre connection. There was one new entrant – Romania – which enters the Ranking in 13th place with more than 120,000 FTTH/B subscribers.

Bulgaria shows the fastest progression in the Ranking, moving from 16th to 8th position during H1-2010, and increasing penetration by 4%. And Lithuania, still in first place, showed the second fastest growth rate, boosting subscriber penetration by 3.3%.


The majority of FTTH subscribers (74%) are concentrated in eight countries, in the following order: Sweden, France, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, The Netherlands, Denmark and Slovakia. Amongst them, six countries can boast more than 200,000 subscribers – and Denmark as well as Slovakia are getting close.