China’s FTTx market is currently dominated by FTTB, partly because the cost of deploying FTTB is less than 50% of that for FTTH.
However, according to Pyramid Research, as the demand for bandwidth increases behind the growing popularity of content sharing, media downloads and gaming, operators have begun to invest heavily in the FTTH deployments.
The country’s largest fixed operator, China Telecom, is the most aggressive in expanding its fibre network. China Telecom already achieved 10 million FTTH passes by the end of 2010, and expects to reach 30 million by the end of 2011.
It has a goal of reaching 100 million homes by the end of 2015. In Shanghai alone, with more than $800 million invested since 2009, 1.5 million households are already FTTH-enabled, and China Telecom is on track to connect an additional 1.5 million by the end of 2011.
