Asia continues to lead the world on FTTH adoption, with Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan last week named as the leading countries in terms of the percentage of homes that receive broadband communications services over direct fiber optic connections. The announcement was made at the FTTH Council Asia Pacific's 2nd annual conference in Beijing and issued in conjunction with the FTTH Councils of Europe and North America. FTTH Council Asia Pacific vice president Frank Jaffar told Broadband Communities that the first ever global ranking was made possible by a common definition for FTTH adopted by all three council's last year.

Jaffar also noted that interest in FTTH was growing strongly, with the Beijing conference attracting around an 80% growth in participation, with a strong contingent from the local Chinese industry. According to the FTTH deployment rankings, 21.2 percent of homes in Hong Kong are wired with FTTH, followed by South Korea at 19.6 percent and Japan at 16.3 percent. Scandinavian countries occupy the next three positions, with Sweden having 7.2 percent of its households connected to FTTH, Denmark at 2.9 percent and Norway at 2.5 percent. Taiwan, Italy, People’s Republic of China, The Netherlands and the United States round out the top 11 economies, with FTTH penetration rates of between 1.4 and 1 percent of households. Only economies with penetration of 1 percent or more were included in the ranking. According to Jaffa, the leading countries all have strong public sector support. "It is clear that countries that lead in FTTH do so because of the fact that their national governments have accepted the strategic importance of FTTH and have set in place clear targets for the rollout of FTTH and plans to achieve these targets," he said. He added that the notable Asia-Pac country not present in the rankings was Singapore, although he expected the planned introduction of its nationwide NGN project in 2008 would quickly make it a leading FTTH country. The three regional FTTH Councils said they would update and re-issue the rankings on an annual basis, as well as work jointly to further refine the research methods in order to provide more in-depth information. As part of the unified definition of FTTH terms announced by the three councils last year, the ranking includes both FTTH and FTTB (fiber-to-the-building) figures, while copper-based broadband access technologies (DSL, FTT-Curb, FTT-Node) are not included. Meanwhile, next year's venue for the FTTH Council Asia-Pac annual conference will be Kuala Lumpur.