UK Fiber Boom Continues To Grow Rapidly

The UK was the fastest growing fiber market in Europe last year and is expected to expand rapidly over the next five years.
A newly released report from the European FTTH Council singles out the U.K., which boosted itself significantly in the year ending September 2022, the cutoff date for the council's standard data, and has continued to accelerate in the fiber sector since then.
As of September, fiber coverage in the U.K. rose to 42 percent, up from 28 percent a year earlier, thanks to fiber manufacturers adding 4.2 million new homes in the past 12 months.
This makes it the largest increase in the number of homes passed in Europe and has helped propel the market to the top of the FTTH Council's league table. In terms of the number of households passing FTTH/B, the UK now ranks fourth in the EU27+UK table at 12.4 million, ahead of Germany, followed closely by Italy, Spain and France, the last of which is now a distant second. Incidentally, adding Turkey to the list of 39 EU countries would drop the UK to fifth place.
In percentage terms, the UK was the second fastest growing market last year, with a growth rate of 51%, behind Belgium at 60%.
By next year, the FTTH Council expects the UK to be second in the table with 16.8 million homes, but it will fall back to third place by 2028, after Germany's projected growth will put it at the top of the list.
But while the UK has much to celebrate - and its progress is not surprising given the growing number of fiber manufacturers in the market - there is still much to do. The UK is one of the most populous countries in Europe, which naturally helps in terms of absolute FTTH numbers. But penetration rates are still lagging a bit, and the market is still some way from full coverage - or even high coverage.
With 3.3 million FTTH/B subscribers, the UK ranks fifth in the EU27+UK, a significant increase from last year. However, this means penetration is only 11.1 percent, leaving the UK still near the bottom of the table. Iceland leads with 76.8 percent, followed by Spain with 73.5 percent, which has been pushing hard for fiber for years.
As a result, only Germany has more work to do than the UK to achieve full fiber coverage. The majority of Germany's 33 million premises are still to be adopted, compared with just over 17 million in the UK, although these figures have undoubtedly changed since last September, given the frenetic pace at which we've seen fiber deployment announcements in both countries.
The FTTH Council predicted that the UK penetration rate would continue to hover near the bottom of the table in the 2023 and 2028 data updates. However, the actual figures show significant progress, with market penetration reaching 43% by 2028. Granted, most countries/regions will be over half by then - only seven of the EU-27 + UK markets reached that milestone this year - and a dozen will be around or above 75 percent.
But the outlook for fiber in the UK looks much brighter than it did a few years ago.