Rural FTTH: Media Does Not Always Tell Us Much About Speed

It is common when measuring internet access progress to look at coverage, take rates, speeds and prices. Fiber to the home adoption almost always is measured in terms of coverage.That is only analytically helpful up to a point. 

In some markets FTTH might be the only practical way to supply gigabit per second and eventually multi-gigabit per second speeds. Not in all markets, however. And though FTTH might eventually be the only way to supply terabit-per-second speeds by mid-century, that is a ways off. 

In the meantime, media choices are one thing, but commercially-available speeds, competition and facilities-based differentiation extend beyond FTTH itself. 

Consider FTTH in rural areas. 

For example, fiber to the home (or basement for multiple dwelling units) covers about 22 percent of rural households, compared to 45 percent for all territories in the European Union and United Kingdom, a new study by the Fiber to the Home Council Europe. 

Spain has 60.5 percent rural FTTH/B coverage in 2020 while Germany has 9,8 percent coverage of rural dwellings.  

source: IDATE 

What is not clear is how much additional bandwidth, and therefore speed, is available on those lines. According to the NTCA, a trade group representing more than 650 rural telcos in the United States, nearly 70 percent of their customers are connected by FTTH, up from 58 percent in 2018.  

That 2020 survey also reported that 68 percent of NTCA member customers can receive downstream speeds greater than 100 Mbps. Some 80 percent can receive downstream speeds greater than 25 Mbps, up from 57 percent and 70 percent in 2018, respectively. 

Just under half (45 percent) of customers have access to 1 Gbps or higher downstream broadband speed, a metric that has nearly doubled in just two years (23.4 percent in 2018), NTCA says. 

So FTTH and gigabit per second speeds are not identical, it appears. Some 45 percent of customer locations can buy service at such speeds, while FTTH is deployed to 70 percent of locations. 

So fiber and gigabit are not identical. Nor does the existence of FTTH tell us anything for certain about available speeds.