Europe Remains Leader for IPTV

LONDON: With strong consumer demand and active fiber rollouts, Europe continues to be the leader for IPTV, according to the latest estimates from the Broadband Forum.

IPTV is approaching 55 million subscribers globally, and European markets account for 23.5 million of those customers. Hybrid Fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) deployments have been on the rise, with a 69-percent increase in the 12 months to September 2011, reaching 9.8 million connections. There were 741,563 new Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) connections added in Europe in the same period, reaching 3.2 million. The number of DSL broadband connections increased by 9.2 million to 125.8 million. The number of cable broadband connections increased by a little less than 2 million to reach 25.8 million.

Oliver Johnson, the CEO at Point Topic, which prepared the study for Broadband Forum, said: “The future of Europe, at least for the next 5 years, is going to be dominated by FTTx. The cost of full fiber (FTTH) deployment, particularly the last mile, is prohibitive and so the industry and consumers need a stepping stone which is provided by hybrid solutions such as FTTx. FTTx provides a significant increase in bandwidth and an efficient use of existing infrastructure and allows the welcome continued amortization of costs.”