2007 Global FttH - Fibre Networks Becoming a Reality

Fibre-To-The-Home (FttH) is making great progress and finally becoming commercially viable. Advances in digital technology driven through fibre optic telecommunications promises great change - the new explosion of bandwidth will enable interactive multimedia and video information to come into households, schools, businesses etc in a variety of ways. There are various drivers behind the push for FttH, and it varies from country to country. Broadly speaking they can be categorised as economic, social, entertainment and business drivers. For more information, see chapter 1.2, page 7.

The other positive development is that the new FttH networks seem so much simpler than the original Phase 1 VDSL/fibre deployments. FttH should simplify the deployment process significantly and make the networks easier and cheaper to maintain. In addition, once all the initial work has been done, IT programming costs will also be greatly reduced.

Asia is the one region of the world where FttH has started to emerge as a serious broadband platform. Not unexpectedly, the movement towards fibre has occurred in Asia’s more developed markets, where positive government intervention plays an important role. For more information, see chapter 1.1, page 1.

Japan and South Korea were the first leaders in terms of deployments, due to strong government visions regarding national infrastructure development. It was seen as beneficial for these countries generally; especially in terms of developing new products and services that could be exported to global markets.

Today the progress of FttH around the world can not only be attributed to Japan and South Korea, but also to the large-scale deployments taking place in the USA and some parts of Europe. In 2007 more than 200 significant deployments of fibre cabling are occurring in Europe. In mid-2007 Sweden had more than 7% of households connected to fibre, Denmark and Norway 3% and The Netherlands about 2%. Fibre penetration is set to grow quickly in the next few years as the FttH and hybrid FttN/xDSL networks from incumbents and alternative operators come online. For more information, see chapter 2, page 20.

This report provides an insight and analysis into the trends and developments taking place in the FttH sector. A global overview of the progress of FttH is provided, as well as information at a regional level incorporating North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific. The report includes statistics and forecasts and also provides detailed technical information on FttH technology. Please see chapter 3, page 50.

Key Highlights:

• FttH deployment will be much faster in areas where there are clear business models for it (such as metro areas).
• Incumbents need to upgrade their access and core networks in order to increase and improve upon speed, network capacity, resilience/redundancy and network cost reduction.
• Education is just one of the important social aspects of fibring up countries – access to the Internet is already seen as a vital element in school education. Interactive video is going to add that special element to education which will make fibre optic networks even more important for community social structures.
• Asia leads the world in terms of FttH household penetration, with Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan the leaders in that region. For more information, see chapter 2.5, page 29.

FttH subscribers, penetration and growth - Japan, USA, Europe - mid 2007