NEWS EUROPE
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European incumbents wake up to FTTH
As competition starts to bite, the pace of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment in
Europe is accelerating, according to the latest figures presented at the FTTH Conference 2015 in Warsaw. This year, the FTTH Council Europe reported 60 per cent growth in the number of FTTH/B subscribers in the European Union member states over the year to December 2014. The total number of FTTH/B subscribers in
Europe – from Iceland in the west to Turkey in the east – has now reached nearly 15 million (14.8 million to be exact); 12.3 million of them reside in the EU. If you include Russia and the Commonwealth of Independant States, the number of FTTH/B subscribers jumps to 30.2 million. ‘We are today in the ramp-up phase of
subscriber adoption in Europe and the incumbents are playing a key role,’ said Roland Montagne, head of telecoms business unit at Idate, which collects and analyses the data on behalf of the FTTH Council Europe. Over the past year, incumbents have
increased their overall market share of homes passed by 2.2 per cent to reach 27.7 per cent – even though they are vastly outnumbered by alternative operators, utility companies and municipal projects. Incumbents led the FTTH roll-outs in both
Lithuania and Latvia, which already enjoy 100 per cent coverage with FTTH/B. Lithuania currently leads the FTTH ranking with nearly 35 per cent subscriber penetration, having overtaken Sweden, while Latvia lies in third place. In this second wave of incumbent
deployments, it’s often competitive players that spur the incumbents to act. In France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Turkey it was the alternative operators that made the first move towards fibre. ‘Incumbents are very powerful players. If they
0%
Lithuania Sweden Latvia Russia Romania Norway
Portugal Bulgaria Slovenia Denmark Finland
Slovakia Estonia
Luxembourg Netherlands Hungary Ukraine Spain Turkey
France EU28
Macedonia Switzerland Czech Republic Italy
0% 5% 10% European FTTH ranking at December 2014
commit, then they can move very quickly,’ noted Graham Finnie, senior analyst with market research firm Heavy Reading. He points to Spain, where Telefónica passed
more than 6 million homes with FTTH over the course of last year. As a result, Telefónica has become the first operator in Europe to have more FTTH lines than Verizon – even before Verizon’s decision to sell some of its territories to Frontier. Romania is another case in point. Last in the
ranking a year ago, the country has leapt up into fifth place and nearly 25 per cent of Romanian homes now have FTTH subscriptions. In 2014 Telekom Romania rolled out gigabit broadband via FTTH to 13 major cities across the country.
Other incumbents to make significant
progress in the past year, according to Idate’s data, were Orange France, which passed an additional 897 000 homes in 2014; TeliaSonera in Sweden with another 416 000 homes passed; Reggefiber in the Netherlands with 312 000 homes passed; while Turk Telekom in Turkey covered an additional 300 000 homes. Heavy Reading predicts that the number of
FTTH/B connections in wider Europe, including Russia, will double over the next five years to reach almost 62 million by 2019. Of those 62 million, Finnie expects almost half (47 per cent) will be delivered by incumbent national operators.
15% 20% 25% 30% 35%
Fibre-to-the-home subscribers Fibre-to-the-building + LAN subscribers
5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%
Transmode upgrades metro network in the Canary Islands
Packet-optical equipment developer Transmode has deployed a high-capacity network based on its TM-Series and TG-Series platforms for the Tenerife Island Council (Cabildo Insular de Tenerife) in the Canary Islands. The new metro optical
network will connect all the council’s facilities and offices
across the island, providing high-capacity access to the D-ALiX carrier-neutral data centre location. D-ALiX, formerly the Western Africa-Canary Islands Network Access Point, is a strategic hub in the south of Tenerife that provides international connectivity via submarine cables – both existing and planned – to Africa and the
6 FIBRE SYSTEMS Issue 7 • Spring 2015
rest of the world. The new packet-optical
network connects 38 council sites on Tenerife in a multiple ring configuration for protection and resiliency. Council departments at each site can connect to a high-speed local area network and run managed, differentiated services over a 40-wavelength flexible optical
network controlled by Transmode’s Enlighten multi-layer management suite. In addition to the TM-Series
placket optical platform and TG-Series passive optical access platform, Tenerife Island Council deployed Transmode’s family of EMXP packet-optical transport switches, which provide Carrier Ethernet 2.0 services over an
Ethernet layer. ‘After a competitive tender,
we selected Transmode’s solution,’ said Carlos Alonso Rodríguez, president of Tenerife Island Council. ‘Transmode was the only vendor able to provide a solution that was easy to roll out without the need for amplification at any of the remote locations.’
FTTH Council Europe
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