European high-speed access grows but trails behind Asia

Western Europe had 1.553 million fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-building (FTTH/B) customers and 777,000 VDSL customers at the end of last year, according to a report by French research group IDATE. Central and eastern Europe had 769,000 FTTH/B subscribers and 32,000 VDSL subscribers.

Globally, IDATE counted 29 million FTTH/B and 1.855 million VDSL subscribers at the end of 2008, about 80% of whom were in Asia.