Fibre broadband has many benefits over older broadband solutions beyond speed. Notably, passive optical networks are also greener because of their better energy efficiency and lower operational costs. This attractive combination of environmental credentials and fibre’s well-known performance advantage is causing European countries to accelerate their transformation to fibre. But new approaches to deployment and operations, often using AI, can help laggards catch up with Europe’s fibre leaders.
Half of European countries have already started to switch off copper access lines or begun their closure, according to a study of 27 EU countries plus the UK by the FTTH Council Europe, published in January 2025. Not all of these markets have published public plans for copper switch-off — some have begun the process without a plan, others have a plan but are yet to begin switch-off. Of those 28 markets, eight, or slightly over a quarter, have a public plan. In two countries, Finland and Spain, the target date for completion is as soon as 2025.
This momentum behind fibre is important for numerous reasons. Laggard markets need new tools and approaches to move more quickly if they are to reap the environmental, cost, speed and capacity benefits of fibre to the home (FTTH) or fibre to the building (FTTB).
While leading markets like Portugal, Sweden and Spain have over 90% of incumbent access lines already switched over to FTTH or FTTB, other markets are far behind. Germany and Czechia have just 5%, Greece has just 4%. Even in Italy, where 20 years ago challenger operator Fastweb (later acquired by Swisscom) was one of Europe’s leaders in fibre and IPTV, only 10% of incumbent access lines are FTTH or FTTB.
The Green Argument for Fibre Fits Well with European Ideals
The fibre transformation has often been positioned as a speed, capacity and cost play, but the environmental advantages are if anything even more significant. Across Europe, this naturally fits with the continent’s global leadership in sustainability. Operators are now focusing on accelerating the deployment of 10G-PON technology to extend the performance advantage of fibre over other broadband technologies.
Operator finance and environmental teams are excited by the opportunity for energy savings from closing down the powered street cabinets essential for VDSL and G-Fast copper-based broadband lines. Cabinets need heating in winter, active cooling in summer, and many electrical components year-round. Those components are also susceptible to failure, which requires an engineer visit to fix. This has a monetary cost and a carbon impact because of the energy cost of reaching the site and the carbon used for any replacement parts. By contrast, passive fibre has a considerably longer usable range — tens of kilometres — than copper-based broadband, which has a very limited range of a few hundred metres from a street cabinet. In addition, in most cases fibre does not need active electrical equipment between a central office and customer premises.
Alongside the green credentials of fibre, it’s also important that the fibre customer premises equipment is also energy efficient. Service providers have two choices. The first is to offer a standalone optical network terminal (ONT) and allow users to connect their own video streaming box to the local network. In this scenario, a good set of Wi-Fi access points will be needed to reliably connect the whole of the home or office. Using a supplier like ZTE that has all options available means a service provider has flexibility in adapting its offering to different urban areas or the layout of customers’ homes and offices. Wi-Fi 7 is important for its improved capability here.
In the second option, a service provider can offer a bundled ONT and streaming box in a single unit. This offers greater cost savings, and minimizes the challenge of reliable Wi-Fi, reducing customer support problems. However, in this case, ensuring there is fibre to the room (FTTR) becomes important.
On the optical line terminal side, ZTE offerings use AI methods to detect the status of the shelf, card, port and fan, and dynamically adjust the power consumption or the fan speed, or switch to the low-speed channel when the traffic is not so high.
With an Optical Distribution Network, Operators Benefit from New Processes
There are still areas that can cause issues with an optical access network. Third parties may cause problems, for example a contractor may accidentally sever a fibre. Alternatively, the fibre split used to share a single central office fibre’s capacity across a group of customers may have an issue. Or the pole carrying a fibre may suffer damage in a storm. Whatever the cause, operators need new tools to identify problems, and know when to send an engineer and when to resolve in other ways. Often now AI-based optical network understanding approaches can speed issue resolution, such as those from ZTE.
Optical network construction also requires a clear view of the environment and how best to structure the network. For example, to identify and understand the deployment options for ducts or poles, and where best to place fibre splits. These approaches can lower initial cost but also optimize the quality of the resulting network and ensure it is subsequently easier to manage.
Operators should look to streamline processes when deploying an optical access distribution network as well as during its operation. It’s also important to work with a supplier that has a smooth upgrade path from the gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) that is commonly deployed in Europe to 10G-PON soon and in time to 50G-PON. ZTE claims second place in the global 10G-PON market with a third of 10G-PON users connected over ZTE equipment. With the right choice of fibre cable, access networks can be moved onto these much faster and higher capacity levels without fibre replacement, but by upgrading the optical electronic equipment at users’ premises and in central offices.
Intelligent optical distribution networks (ODN) are an emerging a trend. Adding intelligence enables operators to visualize the passive fibre network. This improves management and maintenance. By using AI technologies, the topology of the ODN can be updated quickly when there are changes, which together with the visualization enables operators to detect faults fast or even be warned in advance of a fault that affects performance.
Improved Fibre-Based Revenue Opportunities
Fibre enables higher-quality TV video streams, more simultaneous TV viewing, improved gaming services, and new video communication offerings. These give service providers new tools to add revenue streams or to bundle features alongside broadband internet access to lock in customers and help to improve customer retention.
Fibre also enables simpler marketing of these offers because its service quality is much more predictable and uniform than older broadband technologies. With fibre networks transitioning to improved 10G-PON fibre technology, operators can ensure consistent and even higher-speed connectivity to all user premises. Fibre can deliver the same service to any customer, provided the central office fibre equipment and the ONT in the customer’s premises support that grade of fibre. This greater predictability simplifies both above- and below-the-line marketing as well as making life easier for customer support agents.
Accelerating the Fibre Future
European markets are embracing fibre, but the pace of adoption varies enormously despite the clear benefits and alignment with European views on sustainability. To further accelerate fibre deployment, operators are prioritizing the rapid expansion of 10G-PON to extend the performance advantage of fibre over competing broadband technologies.
Improving the ease of fibre deployment and offering new operational management systems that can ensure network quality and minimize environmentally costly engineer visits are critical in establishing strong fibre broadband networks that can scale from gigabit through to 50 gigabit and beyond as Europeans’ digital needs expand in the years ahead.
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