French fixed broadband operators achieved strong quarterly growth in FTTP lines, adding 945,000 net connections in the three months to September (+635,000 in Q2). According to Arcep's latest report, the FTTP segment totalled 9.25 million subscriptions across mainland France and the overseas territories, representing 31 percent of the overall fixed broadband market. The country’s FTTP take-up rate rose by 2 percentage points since June to reach 42 percent, meaning that 42 percent of people able to access FTTP services have opted to do so.
Growth in FTTP lines was the main driver behind the ongoing progression in the country’s high-speed fixed broadband market, delivering download speeds of at least 30 Mbps across several access methods (FTTP, cable, VDSL and fixed LTE). This market counted 13.56 million subscriptions at end-September, including a declining number of cable/hybrid fibre-coaxial lines with a download speed of at least 100 Mbps (1.09 million from 1.13 million at end-June).
When including slower connections, mainly in the shrinking ADSL segment, the overall fixed broadband installed base reached 30.26 million, up by 217,000 in the three months to September (+143,000 in Q2).
Arcep highlighted that fibre operators accelerated their roll-out pace for a second consecutive quarter. The FTTP footprint increased by an additional 1.45 million premises since June to reach 22.28 million. While this expansion has strengthened sequentially (from 1.32 and 1.17 million in Q2 and Q1 respectively), it remained lower than the record of 1.64 million new premises passed in Q4 2019.
As in the previous quarter, deployment activities mainly focused on areas covered by the AMII agreement (nearly 900,000 new premises, up from 700,000 in Q2), primarily across mid-size towns where Orange and SFR are investing without the help of public subsidies. There was also ongoing progress in the roll-out of public initiative fibre networks (+450,000 from over 400,000 new premises in Q2).
Coinciding with the publication of this report, the regulator announced that it has granted the status of "fibre area" ("zone fibree") to two territories in the Aisne and Loire departments, covering 51 and 23 municipalities respectively, where local authorities are facilitating the deployment of public initiative networks.
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