The future of broadband in the UK is fibre to the home

Experts are becoming increasingly concerned over how far behind the UK is getting with broadband connection speed as surveys show the average connection speed in the UK to be around 4Mbps compared to the 1Gbps offered to consumers in countries like Japan and South Korea.

Telecoms regulator, Ofcom recently advised that most consumers were happy with the average UK connection speed of 4Mbps, which was calculated from recent research figures. If, however, this question had been asked in a country like South Korea or Japan where uses have access to broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps, which is also fully symmetrical meaning that download and upload speeds are the same, the answers from their customers would probably be completely different.

The reason why countries like these can offer such super-fast broadband services is because they use Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), which is something that is almost non-existent in the UK.

The broadband services offered by Japan were, until a few years ago, both overpriced and slow until a huge FTTH program was initiated and subsidised by the Japanese government, which turned the country into one of the global leader for broadband connection speeds with 13.2 million users connected using FTTH broadband services. With over 40 percent of homes connected using fibre optics, South Korea is currently the country with the largest proportion of FTTH users.

The increase in FTTH take-up is unsurprisingly set to be steep according to a forecast from the consultancy, Ovum following a recent survey.

The Ovum report stated ‘The time for the access fibre vendor is finally coming. However, there is always a victim in such transitions and, in this case, that is DSL (ADSL in particular), as the worldwide market grinds to a halt and even goes into decline in a number of countries.’

Source – New Electronics