With over 38,700 buildings connected as of the end of June, it's clear that Fiber to the Home (FTTH)-based connections are making an impact in the French broadband market.
According to French telecom regulator Arcep, FTTH connections in France rose 14.5 percent since the first quarter. In total, these buildings include about 910,000 FTTH-eligible residences, a 9 percent quarter-on-quarter and 40 percent increase over the same first quarter period last year.
Of course, the growth of FTTH is just one element of the overall growth of France's competitive broadband market. Copper-based DSL continues to see good take-up in France by both incumbent carrier France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) and various competitive providers that rent facilities from the carrier to deliver services to their residential and business customers.
At the beginning of July, France Telecom reported that had 10.3 million wholesale broadband DSL connections were being used by competitive providers, a 1.13 million increase over 2009. Included in this mix were 7.14 million unbundled lines, while 1.26 were partially unbundled, 1.33 were standalone ADSL or DSLE bitstream Pro and 515,000 were bitstream ADSL.
For more:
- TeleGeography has this article
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