Arcep recently unveiled its figures for the deployment of fiber in France, during the fourth quarter of 2019. Our team offers you an inventory and an analysis, in order to better understand them.
The commissioning of FttH sockets is accelerating on most networks in public initiative areas, while deployments are very advanced in very dense areas.
At the end of Q4 2019, deployments of FttH sockets in very dense areas were nearly 90% complete. In the AMII zones, the deployment rate is over 65% (Orange and SFR still have to deploy 3.7M and 0.9M sockets in these areas respectively). The sites are accelerating and have jumped in one quarter from 17% of catches covered in rural areas to 21%.
Despite the progress of deployments in ZTD, gaps in terms of coverage exist with in particular some large cities below the 66% mark
Among the 106 municipalities in the very dense zone, 50 have an FttH coverage rate of over 95%.
However, 13 municipalities are covered at less than 66%, such as Rouen, Marseille, Nancy or Toulon. Three other large cities are even covered at less than 50%, namely, Bobigny, Lille and Clermont-Ferrand.
In 2019, among the 10 cities that have improved their coverage rate the most, 7 are located in Ile-de-France:
- Saint-Denis (+ 33%)
- Les Ulis (+ 24%)
- Ivry-sur-Seine (+ 23%)
- Pantin, Malakoff and Noisy-le-Grand (+ 21%)
- Longjumeau (+ 20%)
The national average FttH coverage is nearly 50% but it is carried by the most populous departments and hides strong geographic disparities
If the national average FttH coverage is nearly 50%, it is carried by the most populous departments, in particular Ile-de-France, Hauts-de-France or the Lyon region, while nearly 40 % of departments do not reach the 25% coverage mark.
These disparities are all the more visible in rural areas, covered on average at 21%. In fact, most of the RIP zones in the departments to the west of the Caen – Saint-Etienne axis or in the heart of the Grand Est and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regions have less than 25% fiber. As for the departments of the PACA region (except Vaucluse), Corsica and Overseas (except Reunion).
The pace of deployment of FttH sockets is accelerating and reaching a record level in Q4 2019, driven by the growth in deployments in the RIP zone and in the AMII zone
The rate of deployment of FttH outlets reached a record level in Q4 2019. More than 1.6 million FttH outlets were deployed in Q4 2019, more than 400k more than in Q3 2019 which held the previous record.
If the AMII Orange zone continues to represent almost half of deployments, the zones experiencing the strongest acceleration since Q4 2017 are the RIP zone and the AMII SFR zone with average quarterly growth rates of + 19.3% and 9, 6% respectively.
In very dense areas, despite a small number of outlets still to be covered (c. 0.7M), there is an upward trend in the volumes deployed each quarter.
Ranking of the ten departments whose AMII zones are best covered in FttH
The two departmental AMII zones with a coverage rate of nearly 100% are those of Mayenne and Bas-Rhin, followed by those of Corse-du-Sud, Gironde and Val-d’Oise, deployed at more than 90%.
Ranking of the ten departments whose RIP zones are best covered in FttH
The four departmental public initiative areas with the best FttH coverage are Oise, Loire, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne with coverage rates exceeding 90%. Among the ten areas of public initiative at the departmental level the best covered in France, only Seine-et-Marne is less than 50% at the end of Q4 2019.
In Q4 2019, 13% of municipalities in rural areas achieved coverage rates greater than 90%
In Q4 2019, the pace of the increase in the number of municipalities covered to more than 90% in the RIP zone is accelerating. Their proportion of the RIP zone goes from 10% to 13% in one quarter.
Status of FttH deployments by municipality in metropolitan France
In Q4 2019, the municipalities with the best FttH coverage were mainly located in Ile-de-France, Oise, Loire, Reunion, Hauts-de-France and Alsace.
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