Abstract
This report provides an overview of the broadband markets and key players in
the main Eastern Europe countries.
Broadband in Eastern Europe is rapidly gaining momentum, driven by increasing
competition and more widespread deployment of DSL and/or cable services.
Poland and Russia have exhibited the highest levels of absolute growth over
the previous six-year period. As a proportion of households, Internet
penetration is highest in Poland, with Czech Republic and Slovakia also
showing rapid adoption.
Hungary is currently leading Eastern Europe in terms of broadband penetration.
Ukraine continues to be relatively undeveloped in terms of Internet and
broadband penetration, largely due to poor Internet infrastructure, and low
availability of residential broadband.
Broadband availability is gradually improving across most of Eastern Europe,
with higher levels of bandwidth and improving geographical coverage. Bandwidth
in excess of 5Mbit/s is now available in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,
Russia and Ukraine. Within the broadband market, DSL is gaining increased
momentum, most notably in Slovakia and Russia, whilst the prevalence of UPC is
driving cable in some key areas. Ukraine is an exception to this, where Volia
has enabled cable to overtake DSL for the first time.
The state of Eastern Europe' s telecommunications differs significantly across
the region, with a mix of aluminium, copper, fixed-wireless and fibre
networks. In many of these countries, we are seeing significant
fixed-to-mobile substitution, largely due to low fixed line penetration in
some countries.
The majority of networks are copper-based, but in a number of countries legacy
aluminium networks are still used for communications services. We have a spurt
of municipal fibre deployments, but these have been relatively few and are
typically not extended beyond the initial group of residents.
Due to the relatively low fixed-line penetration in much of Eastern Europe, we
see an opportunity for fixed-wireless access, at least in the short term. The
demand for advanced content is limited, which would deem FWA a good
alternative for basic data, and even VoIP services.
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