ARCEP
FTTH was ~60% of France fixed broadband market in Q1-2023
FTTH lines made up nearly 60% of French fixed broadband market in Q1-2023. FTTH subscriptions across mainland France and the overseas territories reached a 59.4% share of the country’s fixed broadband market at the end-March 2023, up by 10 percentage points from Q1 2022.
Viva La France!
According to the latest update from France regulator Arcep, the FTTH installed base added 895,000 net connections since December for a total of 19.02 million (+965,000 in Q4), representing a 22.8% increase year-on-year. As of March 31, 2023, 35.3 million premises (apartments, houses, offices, etc.) can be connected via FTTH i.e. a little over 80% of premises in the national territory. If you add cable internet that gives us 37.6 million locals who potentially have access to very high speed on wired networks in France. This represents a growth of approximately 3.6 million over the past year.
96% of Paris is connectable to optical fiber, but it’s only 50% in Lille. No explanation is given for this slowdown which is not in line with the France Very High Speed Plan which aims to generalize optical fiber throughout France by 2025.
Other high-speed networks (cable, VDSL and fixed wireless/LTE) continued to see their combined installed base decline quarter-on-quarter (-129,000) to stand at 3.25 million. As a result, the number of overall lines delivering download speeds of at least 30 Mbps reached 22.27 million at end-March.
The ADSL segment maintained its downward trend, leading to a further drop in connections delivering less than 30 Mbps. This brought the installed base across all fixed broadband networks to 32.04 million, up by 99,000 since December. This compares to with 63,000 market net additions in the previous quarter and 133,000 in Q1 2022.
Looking at progress in the ongoing fibre roll-outs, French operators brought FTTH connectivity to 840,000 million additional premises in the three months to March, for an overall footprint of 35.29 million. The pace of deployment slowed down from 1.3 million premises passed with fibre in the December quarter, and 1.1 million in Q1 2022.
On a year-on-year basis, the volume of new premises passed with fibre roughly halved across both densely populated metropolitan areas and mid-sized towns with privately funded roll-outs, while recording a 10% fall in public initiative fibre networks under deployment in rural communities. The latter reached a footprint of 12.8 million premises eligible for FTTH services at end-March, representing 610,000 additional premises since December.
Associated documents:
- Scorecard for fixed broadband and superfast broadband services – figures for Q1 2023
- Maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr, to obtain detailed information on fixed internet access coverage, particularly thanks to FttH rollout maps (which are also still available athttps://cartefibre.arcep.fr/)
- Open data:data on fibreand data on all access technologies
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