FTTH on the rise at ADSL expense globally

Stan Beer
Thursday, 09 July 2009 12:10

Business IT - Technology

The next two years will see a rapid increase in FTTH broadband across Western countries and the big loser will be ADSL. This is the forecast of a leading global telecommunications analyst.

According to telecoms analyst Ovum, new broadband forecasts show a steep increase in fibre to the home/building (FTTH/B) over the 2006-2014 period, brought on by increasing deployments of next-generation access (NGA) broadband and significant government investment.

The rise of FTTH/B has dire consequences for ADSL, according to Ovum, with the worldwide market grinding to a halt and even going into decline in a number of countries.

Ovum says the rapid take-up of FTTH/B and subsequent decline of ADSL technologies in Asian countries such as Korea and Japan will soon be mirrored outside of Asia, and a number of western countries will start to see a rapid increase in FTTH/B and thus a decline in ADSL over the next couple of years.

Most notable examples are the US, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.

What's more, access-fibre deployment is not just confined to ‘developed countries’, with a number of emerging markets such as China and Malaysia also having very ambitious FTTH/B projects.

"Even if we take into account an element of government and vendor hype for these markets, Ovum still forecasts a rapid take-up of advanced broadband services in those countries," says Michael Philpott, Practice Leader of Ovum’s Consumer team.

Ovum predicts yhis take-up of next-generation access technologies such as FTTH and FTTB will see traditional DSL technologies saturate at around 320 million lines in the residential market by 2014, with FTTH/B still growing fast at over 160 million lines by the end of the same year.

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