Germany is one of Europe’s “laggards” in ultra-fast broadband because...
Germany is one of Europe’s “laggards” in ultra-fast broadband because of slow fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) take-up, the FTTH Council Europe said Wednesday. Preliminary research showed that only 1 million homes were served by fiber lines at the end of 2011, it…
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said. The German market is dominated by alternative players, often supported by municipalities and utilities, and largely focused on large cities, it said. There are only 166,000 FTTH and fiber-to-the-building subscribers, “a drop in the bucket,” it said. Consumers aren’t very interested in high-speed fiber networks, in part because they're bound by long-term Internet provider contracts and because many of the new connections are either not marketed or marketed badly to end-users, it said. While politicians, carriers and organizations in Germany are still talking about FTTH networks, other countries are rolling them out, it said. It remains to be seen whether 2012 will bring change to Germany’s FTTH stance, said council Director General Hartwig Tauber. For a nation the size of Germany “time is of the essence” in adopting FTTH if the country wants to maintain its leading role as the driving force of the European economy, he said.