The number of fiber broadband subscribers in Asia Pacific rose 35% to 115.8 million at the end of 2014, according to new statistics published by IDATE and the FTTH Council Asia Pacific.
The number of homes connected with fiber, meanwhile, increased 36.8% to 338 million by the end of last year, up 36.8% from 2013, thanks to the widespread adoption of smart city technologies.
“Smart cities are being built upon fiber, including Fiber-to-the Home (FTTH), Fiber-to-the-Building (FTTB), Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) and Fiber-to-the-Antenna (FTTA), to support higher speeds and the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for the smart home,” Peter Macaulay, president of the FTTH Council Asia-Pacific, said in a statement.
Japan leads the region with 100% of homes passed, followed by South Korea and Singapore with 95% each.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and China are also included in the top eight, while other regions demonstrated the huge potential for growth that still exists in the region.
Despite that, Macaulay said there is still a great deal of room for growth in the market.
“This is an exciting time for the council with new deployments in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Pakistan, in parallel with deeper FTTX deployments to support Smart Cities using cloud-based applications,” added Macaulay.
“We are encouraged to see Asia-Pacific homes and businesses becoming more open to the benefits of high speed fiber with faster service creation and provisioning now possible with new fiber architectures.”