FTTH in Japan

A recent report from Yano Research provides interesting figures on the Fiber-to-the-Home market in Japan. With 5.4m FTTH subscribers at the end of March 06, the growth has been 88%. It is forecast that 3m new subscribers would be added each year, bringing the total to 27m by 2011. This growth is driven by demand fueled by lowered monthly fees for broadband internet access services, by lower cost for FTTH and IP phone than for ADSL, and by increased capacity of transmission systems to cope with increasing traffic. As a result, the Japanese optical access network systems market was worth some $645m in FY2005, of which $555m in PON systems and $90m for media converters. The equipment optical access market, however, will stay flat or slightly up over the 05-11 period.