Britain Failed to Catch up with FTTH Broadband Plan

The United Kingdom appeared to have the worst FTTH Broadband, according to a recent report. According to the FTTH Council Europe, there are 22 countries having over 1% of households with access to FTTH broadband, while Europe in a whole featured a 16% increase in subscribers. At the moment, there are over 32,000,000 homes in the region with FTTH, featuring 5,950,000 subscribers.

However, the United Kingdom wasn’t in the rankings because of its low FTTH penetration. The statistics say that the country only has 0.05% of subscribers with access to FTTH, despite the government assurance to ensure the fastest broadband in the region by 2015.


In the meantime, along with increases to speed, FTTH also ensures a more stable connection, because radio interference isn’t a problem anymore. Latency is also less of a problem – this is very beneficial for cloud services and content creators, because the uploading times improve.

FTTH Council Europe claims that key countries not mentioned in the ranking may simply fail to use their chance to create a sustainable future, so they have to make a decision to invest in FTTH right now. Industry experts agree that the United Kingdom is definitely “late to the party", but point out that the country isn’t totally off the radar with its FTTH 175,000 homes and 13,000 subscriptions.

The matter is that most developments so far are small scale, so although they are high in numbers, they still have little impact on the overall picture. Another problem of the United Kingdom is that ISPs like BT Openreach focus on getting fibre to offices rather than to the premise or house. They have been discussing the idea of getting the FTTP service to around 10% of British homes, but thus far most areas are only partially ready, so they focus on the headline-grabbing figures of 11,000,000 homes able to get the FTTC service.

The industry observers are assured that this figure remains a goal, while priorities in the roll-out have changed. The British government has been slowed by the intention to provide more comprehensive FTTH coverage than the other countries offer. The United Kingdom has also concentrated on ubiquity of access, while there are EU members with better FTTH deployments that now face the same kind of digital divide.