In every area of society and business, we’re seeing fast-growing digitalization. There are countless applications that consumers and business are ready to adopt, but which will only truly become successful if they run smoothly, without interruptions or noticeable latency. Future-proof connectivity is the foundation of the digital era; therefore having competitive and affordable fibre for all should be a top priority. We now have a major opportunity to move away from copper, the infrastructure of the 19th century. Digital infrastructure is the utility of the 21st century.

 

What many people still don’t fully realize is that fibre is a prerequisite for tomorrow’s digital society and economy. There needs to be clear understanding that fibre is the only real future-proof enabler for the needs of today and tomorrow. Extending the lifetime of copper can only be a temporary solution. Without fibre, we can’t have adequately performing wireless or 5G base stations that can accommodate more and more devices. Although it’s not immediately obvious, developments such as telemedicine and autonomous vehicles also require ubiquitous fibre. Not only do self-driving cars need wireless connections with incredibly low latency; in some countries traffic lights and bridges are being connected with fibre now.

 

 

Decisive action

 

Ensuring the backbone infrastructure is in place to facilitate all of these developments is one of the major challenges we foresee for the next five to seven years. Decisive action is required from policy makers, investors, operators and other stakeholders. Otherwise, there is a huge risk Europe will fall behind in the area of digital development. Policies in many member states are pointing in the right direction. The European Commission seems to be heading in the right direction. They’ve released a proposal for the European Electronic Communications Code, which is currently in the European legislative process, accompanied by a Communication on the Gigabit Society. The latter sets ambitious Gigabit connectivity targets for Europe by 2025 whilst the proposal prioritises investment in very high capacity networks.

 

As the EU rewrites its telecoms rules, it is crucial for fibre to have a strong voice in the political debate. We should work together to make Europe a global digital leader and for that we have to lay the right base now. In the past, we often spoke of the ‘digital divide’, meaning that some regions were underserved due to a lack of digital infrastructure investments. Today, however, we should speak of the ‘Gigabit’ divide. Before long, 1 Gb/s connections will be a requirement for business and private homes across Europe.  Our last ranking presented in 2016, showed around 39% (EU39) / 27% (EU28) FTTB/FTTH coverage across Europe at end-September 2015. This has been growing consistently over the years.

 

However, there are huge differences between member states. In Spain and Sweden, for example, it’s high, and in France it’s growing fast, whilst almost nothing is happening in other countries, where there’s mainly copper and occasionally Fibre to the Cabinet. In Japan and Korea fibre uptake and usage already exceeds 70%. We’re nowhere near that in Europe - but on the positive side the figures continue to rise!