European FTTH investments could see improvement

Despite an increased pace of FTTH adoption throughout Europe in 2013, the FTTH Council Europe believes there is some room for improvement on the 20.1 million FTTH subscribers before the area can be considered a truly mature fiber market.

According to Total Telecom, FTTH growth reached 29 percent in 2013, nearly double 2012's growth rate of 15 percent. However, many nations failed to reach the threshold for a classification of fiber market maturity of 20 percent population adoption. The U.K. hasn't even reached 1 percent adoption, while only three European nations have achieved this goal - Lithuania, Sweden and Latvia.

"We need to do more and I can't help but feel that some policy makers underestimate the danger of not getting to FTTH networks quickly enough," said Karin Ahl, president of the FTTH Council Europe, according to the source. "Within the next 30 years, 70 percent of the economy is likely to be driven by firms and products we know nothing about today."

While European adoption has been slow, internationally FTTH investments are high. The United Arab Emirates holds first place with nearly 85 percent fiber adoption, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. However, many larger nations, such as the United States in 21st place, are ranked much lower.

Despite the low numbers of total subscribers to FTTH service in Europe, experts are optimistic about the future. According to Broadband TV News, the ultra-fast market in Europe is anticipated to grow by 95 percent over the next five years to reach or exceed 182 billion euros by 2017. The majority of growth is expected to be seen in Eastern Europe, rather than Western.

For providers, the key to expediting these advances and ensuring that consumers are able to take advantage of fiber deployments is to invest in the appropriate media converters for substation and home use. Fiber to Ethernet converters and related hardware will be an essential part of upgrades, transmitting data both ways with minimal latency and maximum efficiency. In turn, this will help boost future investments and the overall success of FTTH growth.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.