FTTH with European Flair

Asia has Long Been the Hotbed of fiber-to-the-home technology, but that is in the process of changing. Over the last year, a number of European incumbent service providers — former PTTs including France Telecom, KPN in the Netherlands, Telefonica in Spain, Telenor in Norway, and TeliaSonera in Finland and Sweden — have announced major FTTH deployments, most driven by competitive pressures from either municipal networks or alternative service providers.

There is still a fair amount of fiber-to-the-node activity in Europe as well, as witnessed by BT's announcement this summer of its broadband access plans, but the overall trend is to push fiber farther, said Benoît Felten, senior analyst for next-generation access for Yankee Group.

“At least in the last year, a lot has been shifting from interrogation to quantification,” Felten said. “But that doesn't necessarily mean that actual penetration of FTTH is extremely high — with the exception of the Nordics, but that has been going on for some time. There is not actually a lot that is deployed, but there are a lot of players who are talking about it and more actively exploring it than a year ago.”

What's worth noting, however, is that European FTTH networks often are quite different from those being constructed in the U.S. For one thing, there is much more competition in Europe from municipalities and alternative providers such as Fastweb in Italy. Because of both regulatory pressures and financial realities, European FTTH networks are much more likely to feature open access, and, in part because of this, they are more frequently Ethernet point-to-point rather than passive optical networks (PONs). In Europe, there also is a greater tendency to market the networks first and build them only after customers have been acquired. Just as in the U.S., however, regulation has been an important factor in investment decisions, and regulatory uncertainty may prove to slow some deployments.

According to IDATE, a European marketing analysis and consulting firm, European FTTH deployment crossed the 1 million subscriber mark at the end of 2007, with FTTH networks passed around 4.9 million homes. Most of these networks, 61%, were built by municipalities or fiber utilities, but IDATE reported the rise of alternative service providers, growing from 10% of all projects to 21% in a year.