French network operators ramped up their fibre deployments in the fourth quarter, bringing FTTP connectivity to another 1.6 million homes and businesses. This represents a new high after two record quarters, when the number of new premises passed the 1 million mark (1.2 and 1.1 million in Q3 and Q2 respectively). Overall, 18.4 million premises had access to FTTP services at the end of 2019, up 35 percent year-on-year, said regulator Arcep in its latest fixed broadband report.
The quarterly growth was driven by fibre deployments in areas covered by the AMII agreement, which mainly concerns mid-size towns where Orange and SFR are investing without the help of public subsidies. Nearly 1 million homes and businesses were passed in the AMII footprint during the fourth quarter. Operators also covered over half a million new premises across public initiative fibre networks.
When including other high-speed services (cable, VDSL, fixed LTE), France closed 2019 with 23.5 million homes and businesses eligible for broadband of at least 30 Mbps, up 17 percent year-on-year.
Looking at FTTP subscriptions, net additions remained on an upward trend, increasing to 705,000 in the fourth quarter (+540,000 in Q3). As a result, the FTTP segment reached nearly 7.1 million connections, representing close to 24 percent of the French fixed broadband market. This growth was mainly at the expense of ADSL lines, which saw their market share decline from 62 to 60 percent since Q3.
Across all networks, French fixed broadband connections increased by 183,000 since September to reach 29.8 million. Out of this total, 11.4 million subscribers received speeds over 30 Mbps, across FTTP, cable, VDSL and LTE-based fixed offers.
