Most EU incumbents yet to present plans to ditch copper – FTTH CouncilMost EU incumbents yet to present plans to ditch copper – FTTH Council

Incumbent operators in only 11 EU countries, plus the UK, have adopted a plan to fully decommission their copper infrastructure – be it in full or only in some areas. Those are the findings of a report by the FTTH Council Europe and Cullen International, which tracks the progress of the 27 member states and the UK on the phase-out.

In Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Spain and Sweden, the incumbents have announced a deadline for their switch-offs, as has one of three Finnish incumbents. In Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK, they have set out a plan (public or confidential) but not a deadline.

With some European significant market operators, or SMPOs, still relying on copper for the vast majority of their active lines and others approaching 100%, the discrepancy is huge, as shown in the tracker below.

(Source: FTTH Council Europe)

Nevertheless, switching from copper to fiber has significant benefits in the form of lower costs and avoided CO2 emissions, due to fiber's greater energy efficiency. According to Analysys Mason, migrating to an all-FTTP access network can slash energy use by up to 80%.

Other financial benefits can be found as well. BT, for example, recently announced that it stands to make £105 million (US$128 million) by selling copper granules made from leftover cables. Meanwhile, fiber networks are faster and more reliable.

The winners…

Closest to the finish line are Portugal, Spain and Sweden, according to FTTH Council. Spain will likely be the first to say goodbye to copper – almost half of Telefónica's local exchanges have been closed, and a full switch-off is to be completed by May this year. 

In neighboring Portugal, a deadline has not been made public, but the incumbent Altice Portugal started its copper phase-out in 2022. It leads when it comes to fiber penetration, with 97% of active lines on its networks being fiber-based, according to the report.

Swedish incumbent Telia, meanwhile, seeks to close down its copper network entirely by 2026.

But some companies have not presented any plans for switching off copper networks, whether publicly or confidentially, to the regulator. This, unsurprisingly, includes those countries where fiber rollouts are still at relatively early stages.

… and the rest

Among the worst offenders are Germany and neighboring Czech Republic, where fiber only accounts for 5% of incumbents' active lines, and Greece with 4%. 

Germany has struggled with its fiber rollout. While the country seeks to cover half of all households by the end of the year, analyst firm Omdia (a sister company of Light Reading) has said that with only 36.8% of them covered, "it has a wide gap to close." Because of the lack of coverage, Omdia expects the copper-to-fiber transition in Germany to be slower than in other European countries.

When it comes to other big markets, France is making progress, with Orange seeking to phase out copper by 2030. The Netherlands is also moving ahead, with nearly three million copper connections closed by the end of 2023. While KPN has not published a deadline, it periodically publishes lists of addresses where copper is due to be switched off. At the same time, just under half of active lines on KPN's network are fiber based.

In the UK, Openreach, the wholly owned networks part of BT, plans to retire the public switched telephone network by January 2027. It has also introduced a stop-sell program, meaning it will no longer sell new copper lines on an exchange in areas where 75% of the premises connected to it can get fiber.

Italy, meanwhile, has only 10% of active lines in the incumbent FiberCop's network based on fiber, but the company has presented a plan to close around 64% of total local exchanges, which involves decommissioning the main distribution frames (MDFs) in the remaining ones.

Long way to go

Curiously, the FTTH Council's findings are slightly different from those of a draft BEREC report published in December, which covered 31 countries and stated that SMPOs in 17 of them had already announced or informed on plans to "switch off all or parts of its legacy copper access network." Unlike FTTH Council, BEREC counts countries including Poland, Italy and Estonia among this number, which may suggest a different methodology.

Nevertheless, BEREC stated that while over half of the SMPOs plan to shut down parts of their copper networks, most won't accomplish this before 2030. It did, however, suggest some progress had been made since 2022, with a significant increase in the number of regulators having set rules for the transition. 

As with many things in Europe, the process of switching off copper appears to be moving at different paces in different countries. While some are ahead of the pack, many European operators still have a long way to go before digging out their last copper line.