Welcome to the Fibre to the Home Council Europe

The three global FTTH-Councils (North-America, Asia Pacific and Europe) presented the long awaited update of the Global Ranking at the FTTH-Council-Europe-Conference in Paris. Using actual end-of-2007-data the Ranking now consists of 14 countries. Asia is still holding the top three places and US moved from 11^th to 8^th rank. There are two new European countries in the ranking: Iceland and Slovenia. Therefore seven out of the 14 countries/economies in the ranking are now European countries.

The discussion about if someone needs 100 MBit in his household is nonsense. If you follow the arguments of Bret T. Swanson, who will give a keynote at the FTTH-Council Europe-Conference in Paris we are on the way to talk about Exabit!

It was Mr. Swanson who created the “exaflood”-idea in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year. Instead of thinking about Megabits he shows very impressive that we already should plan in Exabits and Exabytes – and one Exabyte is no less than 1 Billion Megabytes!

If you want to hear more about this, exclusively presented by Bret Swanson, register for the Paris-Conference, Feb. 27th/28th.

The next General Assembly of the FTTH-Council Europe will be held on April 22^nd/23^rd. This meeting will include elections for a new board and committee chairs. In addition there will be presentations to discuss the numerous activities and projects of the last year.

The 5^th annual conference in Paris is an overwhelming success. More than 2.000 participants visited the conference in the Palais de Congrés in Paris. A high-level-programme with two keynote-plenaries, 12 breakout-sessions and 80 speakers from all over the world proved that Europe is on the way to cross the chasm to mass market fibre. In the exhibition 60 leading companies of the FTTH-industry showed that FTTH is a mature technology that is available for mass-rollouts. Once again, the FTTH-Counci Europe-conference was THE FTTH-flagship-event in Europe!

Rudolf Fischer, CEO of Telekom Austria made a clear statement for FTTH. In an interview with “Der Standard”, an Austrian daily newspaper he said that the copper-lines have to be replaced by fibre in future. 

The number of FTTH subscribers exceeded one million in 2007. This is the result of the actual market-study of the FTTH Council Europe.

The FTTH market in Europe continues to grow. The numbers of subscribers increased nearly 30% from 2006 to 2007 and the “magic” barrier of 1.000.000 FTTH subscribers was therefore passed in the first half of 2007. At the same time also the number of homes passed by FTTH increased to approx. 4 million.

The Minister of Transport & Communication, Mr. Kostas Hatzidakis announced on Feb. 5th, that Greece will invest 2,5 billion Euros in fibre-networks.