Point Topic estimates 4 million users will be on fibre broadband in the UK by 2013

Research firm Point Topic has released new forecasts showing that more than 4 million businesses and households in Britain will be using high speed fibre optic broadband by 2013.

Its findings also show that out of the 22 million broadband lines that are expected to be available at the end of the next five years, connections using fibre optics will account for about 20 percent of these lines.

By 2013 the domestic broadband market in the UK is expected to have 23 percent of users connecting through Cable TV providers, whereas the market share of providers offering connection over copper DSL lines is set to fall from 78 percent down to 57 percent over this period. Most users will be receiving connection speeds of 20Mbps or higher for downloads and providers are expected to use fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) with the final few hundred yards connecting homes using copper DSL lines say the research firm.

Chief analyst at Point Topic, Tim Johnson said “This is probably the first moment when it has been possible to make a plausible forecast for fibre in the UK, based on some real plans and activity.” The statement came after recent provisional plans by BT to deploy fibre lines by 2012 to 10 million homes. Johnson went on to point out “It’ll probably take a bit longer than that but there are lot of other players coming into the market too. So we estimate there will be over 4.4 million fibre lines by the end of 2013.”

The indicated projections by Point Topic show that by the end of 2010 there should be more than 10 million households that will have immediate access to fibre connections and over the following 3 years will rise to more than 11 million.

Mr Johnson said “There’s a lot of controversy about whether and why people are actually going to want such high speeds. I think they will, because they will be attracted by the offer of one single converged service, not lots of separate ones.” He went on to add “People will be able to mix video telephony, TV, audio, online games and virtual worlds, all high quality and high resolution, into the total experience they want at that moment. In fact it’s what today’s teenagers are trying to do right now and in a few more years the technology will catch up with them.”