Japan is the leader in FTTH broadband

Fibre based broadband (FTTH) has not still made any significant impact in Europe. However, some of the nations in Asia Pacific broadband region have fair amount of Fibre To The Home broadband connections. WBIS (World Broadband Information Science) reports that more than one-thirds of broadband connections in Japan are fibre based (FTTH). This makes Japan as the largest FTTH enabled nation in the world. Japan has more than half of global FTTH connections.

In comparison, other neighbouring countries like South Korea, Taiwan and China have also deployed FTTH extensively in their countries. However, in Europe, except a few nations like Switzerland, Italy and Germany, most countries are lacking in infrastructure and active participation by ISPs in the respective countries. Among the European countries that have deployed FTTH, Italy has the highest level of FTTH penetration as the fibre optic broadband connections in Italy make up more than three percent of the global FTTH network. As far as the uptake of FTTH connections is concerned, Sweden is reported to have the highest growth rate among all European countries.

In UK, we do not have FTTH connections till date. Presently, some of the ADSL+2 packages offer speed up to 24 Mbps although the actual speed that a customer gets is never near to the advertised speeds. This is due to the degradation of speed with the length of cable. Most ADSL broadband connections offer best speed when you are within 5 kms from the exchange.