Fibre deployments, broadband, and IPTV up in Europe

What most businesses should do is go to where the money’s at. And right, the money is all on the Internet and on connectivity. There’s a reason why the European digital agenda commissioner, Neelie Kroes, wants Europe’s broadband infrastructure to be modernized. There’s also a reason why counties and countries all over the UK and Europe want to upgrade their broadband networks. In fact, a report that was recently released stated that doubling broadband speeds could increase a country’s national GDP by a few percentages, translating to a couple of billion dollars or so.

So it’s good news all around then for Europe, because it has just been reported that fibre deployments, broadband upgrades and expansions, as well as IPTV have all seen an increase in the continent. The figures were announced at the Broadband World Forum by French research firm iDate.

It was revealed that Lithuania and Norway are the top countries in Europe that have laid down the most fibre networks, followed closely by Hungary and Ukraine. The latter two have been touted to be joining the list of the world’s leading fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) economies. Europe is seen to be enjoying a whopping 24% increase in the number of fibre-to-the-home subscribers in the first two quarters of this year, which was work that was implemented on behalf of the FTTH Council Europe.

As expected, the report didn’t include Russia in its statistics or figures. However, if the nation were to be included, that would bring the total of fibre customers in Europe to 10.2 million. Russia has been extremely active in laying down fibre as of late, having a count of approximately 5 million FTTH subscribers as of June 2011.

Another data collector for the Broadband Forum, Point Topic, added that broadband growth in Europe has been growing steadily and has now reached 558 million homes. This value shows a marked increase of over 29 million in the first half of 2011. Point Topic also reported that IPTV has passed the 50-million global subscribers mark, with France being the largest IPTV subscribing country as over half of its broadband users also subscribe to the service.

The organization predicted that IPTV will reach 60 million subscribers by the year 2020 in the EU, which is thrice the current amount of subscribers.

Source – The Register