NEWS FTTH CONFERENCE REPORT
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Progress without limits
Now is the time to encourage governments worldwide to invest in fibre to the home – not in 20 years time, according to FTTH Council president Karin Ahl. Robert Roe reports
exhibition featured an array of industry-leading companies showcasing new technologies and products spread across a busy exhibition hall. Across from the exhibition hall was the main conference room, which hosted a number of speeches from industry experts across 13 sessions over two days. Karin Ahl, president of the FTTH Council,
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opened proceedings at the conference this year; she delivered a speech with a strong message and positive outlook for the future of FTTH in Europe. ‘You can’t stop progress and you shouldn’t limit people’s ability to communicate. You shouldn’t limit their ability to connect, you shouldn’t limit their ability to create and innovate,’ Ahl said. Ahl highlighted that governments need to do
more to enforce FTTH strategies and make investments now so that they can see the greatest return. Ahl said: ‘Here’s my first message to policy makers – we need to actively encourage fibre to the home and not fall back on interim solutions that won’t be good enough in five, 10, or 15 years’ time.’ Ahl highlighted the success that Sweden has had
with early adoption of FTTH. ‘It is amazing to see the impact of FTTH on innovation. Many ground-breaking applications and services have been developed here thanks to fibre to the home, and this conference will showcase some of these innovations, across a wide range of fields from eHealth to online gaming,’ said Ahl. Online gaming and the innovative services like
eHealth have been a focus of the FTTH conference as they are seen as strong drivers of FTTH adoption. ‘Fibre to the home also has the capacity to transform public services like healthcare, education and government, but it relies on the enablement of the
8 FIBRE SYSTEMS Issue 3 • Spring 2014
here was a distinct air of positivity surrounding the FTTH conference this year, held at the Stockholmsmassan, Sweden from 18 to 20 February. Te
right infrastructure to deliver the right services,’ said Ahl. She continued: ‘While the gaming industry is at the leading edge of network usage today, maybe tomorrow the leading edge will be 4K ultra-high definition TV or 8K TV,’ said Ahl. For these services, there needs to be headroom within the fibre networks and the maximum speeds that can be achieved.
Market analysis Te press conference that took place at the FTTH conference presented data from the end of 2013 collected by IDATE and Heavy Reading, both of which analyse data from both government and
growth was around 15 per cent,’ said Babaali. Growth of 15 per cent for Europe shows that, even in some of the mature markets, growth is still achievable. In the last year 13 countries experienced growth in subscribers of more than 30 per cent. Tese include Spain (34 per cent), the Netherlands (43 per cent), and France and Portugal (both 41 per cent). In absolute terms, the highest numbers of
subscribers can be found in France and Sweden which have around 1.2 million subscribers; Russia still has the largest number of subscribers with more than nine million FTTH/B subscribers, of which 1.4 million were added in 2013. Ukraine and Turkey also feature highly in the subscriber count, with 1.3 and 1.1 million subscribers respectively. To put this in perspective, China and Japan lead the world figures in terms of subscribers with 37 million and 24.7 million respectively. Uptake rates for 2013 were unveiled at the press
telecommunications companies across the world. ‘By the end of 2013, 34 global and 23 European countries had reached the threshold of more than one per cent of homes directly connected with fibre,’ said Nadia Babaali, communications director at the FTTH council, during her introduction to the session. Last year saw Switzerland enter the ranking for
the first time with more than one per cent of the homes in Switzerland now connected to FTTH/B, Europe as a whole now has 29 per cent of its homes covered with access to FTTH/B. ‘FTTH/B adoption in Europe is gathering pace, with the total number of subscribers increasing by 29 per cent in 2013 – substantially faster than the year before, when
conference – uptake rates give the number of subscribers relative to the number of homes passed in a country, which gives a better understanding of consumers’ willingness to adopt FTTH/B as these new services become available. To give an overview, the growth in the number of subscribers was 30 per cent for the European market; take-up rates were 22 per cent. Uptake rates for individual countries vary quite
dramatically, the highest take-up rates can be found in Czech Republic (54 per cent), Norway (50 per cent), Sweden (45.4 per cent) and Finland (41.7 per cent). With the Nordic countries being early adopters of FTTH/B technology in terms of the European market for a number of years it is no surprise that they lead the way in this area also. Current coverage (number of homes passed/
total subscribers) reached 100 per cent in a number of smaller countries this year. Latvia, Lithuania and Andorra all reached 100 per cent coverage with a
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