The French fixed broadband market continued to achieve a steady progression in fibre-based connections in the three months to June, recording 635,000 FTTP net additions since March (+607,000 in Q1). According to Arcep’s latest report, the FTTP segment reached 8.31 million total lines across mainland France and the overseas territories, representing nearly 28 percent of the overall fixed broadband market. At end-June, the country’s FTTP take-up rate stood at 40 percent (meaning that 40 percent of people able to access FTTP services have opted to do so), up from 37 percent a year earlier.
When including all high-speed networks (FTTP, cable, VDSL and fixed LTE), France closed June with 12.63 million lines delivering download speeds of at least 30 Mbps, up by 645,000 in the second quarter. This growth continued to offset the ongoing decline in slower connections, mainly ADSL based. As a result, the overall market reached the milestone of 30.0 million fixed broadband subscriptions, with quarterly net additions broadly stable sequentially at 143,000.
Arcep said that the health crisis had impacted the fibre deployment efforts of network operators, while highlighting that the roll-out pace had been resilient despite the Covid-19 lockdown measures. The second quarter saw the FTTP footprint increase by an additional 1.32 million premises (+1.17 million in Q1), remaining lower than the record of 1.64 million passed in Q4 2019.
This quarterly growth was driven by fibre deployments in areas covered by the AMII agreement (+700,000), which mainly concerns mid-size towns where Orange and SFR are investing without the help of public subsidies. Operators also covered over 400,000 new premises across public initiative fibre networks.
