UK Fibre Rollout Behind

Notice something about the graph below?

That’s right there is no UK!  And that situation is not about to improve, certainly not in the short-term.

The Fibre to the Home Council Europe recently published its 6-monthly global ranking of countries with more than 1% of households connected to fibre optic broadband. In the latest update there are twenty countries featured, up from fourteen last July. Only 7 of the 20 exceed 5% and the top four are Asian economies with South Korea leading the pack at 44%.

The FTTH Council only consider direct fibre connections to the home (FTTH), or to the building with a LAN infrastructure within the building (FTTB/LAN). About 3/4 of the Korean connections and most of those in Hong Kong are FTTB/LAN along with all of the Chinese, Russian and Italian connections and half of the Swedes.

Hybrid fibre / coax systems as used by cable TV companies (Virgin Media in the UK) do not meet the Council’s definition as the fibre stops short of individual premises.

Other recent fibre announcements include an expansion of the point to point FTTH system in Amsterdam from 43,000  to over 100,000 subscribers and a proposed €2.1bn FTTH project for Greece. The Dutch project is interesting in its use of point to point fibre architecture where each subscriber has a dedicated fibre, rather than the shared passive optical network (PON) system favoured by many including Verizon’s FiOS.