Wednesday, August 21, 2019

The Future of the NBN (4): EU collates their National Broadband Plans

As Australia's NBN approaches completion, some 12 years after Kevin Rudd took the NBN to an Australian election, many nations are now nearing completion of their own version. A European document, neatly compares 28 countries within the EU, and their national broadband targets. I summarise this list below.

Data: See the EU document (pdf - Slide 37), html. Full Report (pdf 328pp), and EU Strategy for a Gigabit Society.
EU National Broadband Plan - Targets
Some examples include:
  • Slow: Greece/Italy 100% coverage - 30mbps - 2020 (plus 17 others)
  • Usage: Greece/Spain 50% penetration (ie usage) - 100mbps - 2020 (plus 14 others)
  • Medium: Germany 100% coverage - 50mbps - 2020
  • Fast: Netherlands at 100% coverage - 100mbps - 2023 (plus six others similar eg Italy 85%, Sweden 95% at 2020)
  • Superfast: Sweden 98% coverage - 1Gbps - 2025 (plus Netherlands (vast majority), Belgium 50% and Luxembourg 100%)
  • UK 100% fibre coverage - 2033 (and 15M premises by 2025).

Comparing EU to AU

Looking at these clusters, Australia's NBN seems to sit closest to Germany, with 90% of fixed line network, getting at least 50Mbps, as well as the base 25mbps target for 100% coverage. Australia has neither a usage target (besides Corporate Plan targets of 75% usage) nor gigabit target. The current MTM allows up to 50% of premises to access gigabit once NBN activates upgrades to HFC, FTTC, FTTP.
Structured data (csv) follows: (MacOS 10.14.6 Numbers 6.1)

Country,Cover%,Type,Speed (mbps),Date,Comment
Greece,100,coverage,30,2020,"Inc Cyprus, Spain, Malta, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Czechia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Estonia, France (2022), Hungary (2018), Ireland, Portugal, Romania (inc 80% > 30mbps), Slovakia, Slovenia (last 4%)"
Greece,50,Penetration,100,2020,"Inc Bulgaria homes (Businesses 80%), Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia (60%), Hungary, Ireland (inc 17-21mbps up), Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania (45%), Spain, Sweden"
Germany,100,coverage,50,2018,
Belgium,50,Penetration,1000,2020,"Inc Luxembourg (100% coverage, 500Mbps up), Netherlands (vast majority by 2023), Sweden (98% coverage by 2025)"
Denmark,100,coverage,100,2020,"Inc Denmark (30mbps up), Sweden (95%), Austria (99%), Finland (2025), Italy (85%), Netherlands (2023), Slovenia (96%)"
UK,100,Full fibre,n/a,2033,Inc 15M premises by 2025
// Source: https://t.co/YFd9pA8LZe - slide 37

1 comment:

Jim Holmes said...

Richard,

It is important to have stretch aspirations, but they have to be linked to implementation plans in some way, otherwise they are mere hype that will be shown to be such in the end. So Australia should have inspiring targets supported by a delivery mechanism that is realistically going to deliver the targeted capacity in the planned time.
In the case of Europe and other countries listed it is important to know current progress against their self-declared targets.

Jim