France: 4.7m new FTTH lines in 2022
March 10, 2023
From Pascale Paoli-Lebailly in Paris
The pace of fibre to the home (FTTH) deployment has been continuing at a steady pace, despite sizeable regional disparities, according to French telecom regulator Arcep’s latest ‘scorecard’ for the fixed broadband and superfast broadband market.
The report finds that 4.7 million new FTTH lines were deployed over the course of 2022, including 1.3 million additional premises at Q4.
“Optical FTTH plans, which have represented the majority of all broadband and superfast broadband subscriptions in Metropolitan France since mid-2022, continue to progress rapidly,” notes Arcep.
As of December 31st, 34.4 million premises across Metropolitan France were passed by FTTH, meaning that close to 80 per cent of the 36.9 million premises in the country are able to subscribe to a superfast fixed broadband service.
In terms of subscriptions, the growth of fibre plan subscription numbers remains high and has registered a surge in fibre subscriptions (+ 965,000 at Q4), coupled with the ongoing decline in subscriptions to plans using other classing broadband technologies.
Superfast broadband subscription numbers grew by 820,000 in Q4 2022 to reach 21.5 million, and 67 per cent of all broadband and superfast broadband subscriptions in Metropolitan France (+8 points YoY).
The total number of broadband and superfast broadband subscriptions stood at 31.9 million as of the end of December 2022.
The year-on-year increase shows a rise by 140,000 subscriptions over the previous quarter (versus + 230,000 in Q4 2021).