Australia falling further down the FTTH ladder

Stuart Corner
Monday, 16 February 2009 03:15

IT Industry - Market

There are now more than 20 countries, including Latvia, Estonia and Russia, with FTTH penetration in excess of one percent of households: Australia is not among them.

The FTTH Councils of Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America have issued their latest twice-yearly update ranking countries by FTTH penetration. They say that the number with FTTH reaching more than one percent of households now stands at 20, up from 14 in July 2008 and only 11 in July 2007.

"The growth is largely due to the entry of several European countries in the ranking, as fibre to the home deployment begins to expand across that continent and the total number of FTTH subscribers in Europe approaches two million," they say.

Asian economies maintained their leadership in FTTH market penetration, as South Korea (44 percent of the market), Hong Kong (28 percent), Japan (27 percent) and Taiwan (12 percent) continued to hold the top four places respectively.

Meanwhile, Japan remains the overall leader in terms of the number of fibre-connected homes at 13.2 million, followed by the United States (6.05 million) and the People's Republic of China (5.96 million).

For the first time, the Councils' ranking includes the breakdown for each economy between fibre-to-the-home connections and fibre-to-the -building (FTTB) connections for which the fibre terminates at a multi-unit dwelling and a non-fibre local area network (LAN) delivers service to the individual subscribers. In addition, FTTB subscriber numbers have been added to the totals for the United States, which accounts for much of the substantial increase in that country's totals since the previous ranking in July 2008. Copper-based broadband access technologies (DSL, FTT-Curb, FTT-Node) are not included.