Fixed Line Services Market Intelligence

Industry Outlook & Drivers

Global Fixed Line Services Industry Outlook

Global fixed line revenues have been declining, especially fixed voice; however, wireline data have provided service providers with an alternate source of revenue. The rapid adoption of enterprise trends, such as cloud computing, Big Data and HD collaboration services and the emergence of the data-intensive Internet of Things, are the key factors driving the wireline data services market

Fixed Line Services—Market Maturity

• APAC and LATAM are classified as emerging markets, whereas North America and Europe are classified as developed markets.
• With respect to fixed-line penetration, the MEA region exhibits very low penetration and is observed to be one of the least developed regions.

Global Fixed Line Services—Industry Trends

• Telecommunications service providers are facing competition from OTT service providers in the mature markets and are now bundling content services, along with their traditional offerings, to increase their market attractiveness.
• Revenue from voice-based services has been declining steadily over the past four to five years; this trend is expected to continue and be more pronounced in the developing markets
• Although the overarching trends have impacted few developing countries in the MEA region, the overall impact is observed to be low and is expected to start gaining prominence in the next five–six years.
• Similarly, in the APAC region, the overarching trends are more pronounced in the developed markets, such as Japan and South Korea, and are gaining market adoption in the other developing countries

Global Fixed Broadband and Regulatory Impact

Global Fixed Broadband Subscriptions

• Asia Pacific, Europe and North America are the major drivers of growth for fixed broadband
• Globally, the increase in share of fixed broadband is due to the Asian market growth from 46 percent to 52 percent
• The increase of fixed broadband subscriptions in Europe and the Americas is mainly due to the customer demand for internet services at increased speeds and the increased use of connected devices at home and at work

• The actual global broadband subscription by the end of 2017 is around 940 million, and the subscription by Q2 2018 is above 980 million. East Asia provided 70 percent of additions in fixed broadband subscribers

Major Regulatory frameworks that impact the Wireline Industry

• Net neutrality, being the top regulatory issue, is expected to impact the telecom sector in next couple of years
• The growth in cloud adoption by enterprises, IoT enablement's and growing technology demands increases the regulatory intervention on data privacy and protection
• Most of the developed markets look at data privacy and protection as the major regulatory policy risks, as implementation incurs huge cost and failure to act leads to penalties
• Spectrum release and auction framework policies are expected to be more prevalent in the emerging markets

Global Broadband Developments

Global DSL Ports by Technology, 2017

• Fiber deployments are growing largely in developed and developing countries
• Copper based technologies (DSL, ADSL, ADSL2+) have reduced deployment due to the increase of fiber technology
• The deployment of fiber technology being very expensive, operators are looking to incorporate fiber connected to the already existing copper deployments for faster go to market

G-Fast

• A recent technology used by operators to increase speed, service quality, reduce the deployment cost, quick go to market is expected to achieve with the mix of copper and fiber technology called G-fast
• G-Fast reuses the traditional telephone lines in the last mile to achieve the fiber equivalent speed of 1Gbps and is approved by ITU
• Recently, G-Fast trails underwent in both developing and developed countries like Australia, Panama, Brazil, Croatia, the Republic of Korea, Norway, UK and US

Recent Developments

• Swisscom, a operator in Switzerland has extended G-Fast deployments to increase the speed to 500Mbps to all FTTB and FTTS connection
• Austria A1 has deployed a mix of VDSL2 and G-Fast to support national broadband initiative goal to reach 99 percent of home to receive broadband service at 100Mbps, which has already completed by covering half of Austria Population