Data from specialist comms analyst Opensignal has revealed the UK is very much not a leader compared with other parts of Europe, where in general, the fibre adoption bottleneck is now activation, not buildout.
The study, Europe’s fixed broadband landscape: From fibre coverage to in-home experience, examined 18 European markets, including the UK and Turkey, assessing the region’s broadband infrastructure. By bringing together infrastructure progress and proprietary insights into real-world user experience, Opensignal said it can assess how close European markets are to realising fibre’s promise of “flawless connectivity”, and why the next stage depends on what happens inside the home.
The study focused on three key metrics: broadband download speed; broadband upload speed; and broadband consistent quality. The latter was measured as the share of tests that exceed thresholds needed to support most common everyday online use cases, such as watching HD video, making video calls or playing online video games. The metric is a composite measure of download and upload speeds, latency, jitter, packet loss and time to first byte.
Among the key findings were that Europe’s broadband market is entering a new phase in its fibre transition. Nearly a decade after Europe set its Gigabit Society goals, the fibre transition has materially advanced, but remains incomplete, and is now facing a distinct set of new challenges.
Opensignal quoted research from the FTTH Council’s Europe’s 2026 market panorama, showing that fibre-to-the-home/building (FTTH/B) networks passed 191 million homes (76.8%) in the EU 27 and UK as of September 2025, yet only 105 million (42.1%) subscribed. This translates to a take-up of 54.9% among homes passed – the gap being one of the defining features of Europe’s broadband landscape today. The strategic problem is therefore no longer mainly whether fibre has been built, but whether operators can turn passed homes into active, paying fibre lines.
In a number of markets, fibre coverage has far outpaced take-up, shifting the industry conversation away from how to accelerate deployment, and towards how operators can migrate customers to fibre and accelerate return on investment. At the same time, said the analyst, last-mile infrastructure is only part of the story.
The battleground for reliable connectivity was seen to be moving increasingly inside the home, where Wi-Fi frequently forms the real bottleneck to meaningfully improving the user experience.
Conversion challenge
Looking at fibre adoption in terms of activation, not just buildout, across the EU 27 and UK, FTTH/B roll-out efforts have only translated into take-up of 54.9% among homes passed, as of September 2025, showing that the main challenge is now about how to effectively convert the existing footprint into active lines.
Somewhat worryingly, rapid roll-out has left many markets with a large adoption gap. In contrast, adoption has lagged more noticeably in the Nordics, where the coverage-to-adoption gap ranges from 16.5 percentage points in Finland to 37.5 in Denmark.
A larger middle tier of markets – including the UK, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey and Italy – shows a wider disconnect, where fibre coverage is ranging from 72.2% to 90.2%, but adoption remains limited at just 21.6% to 39.6%. Coverage-to-adoption gaps reach as high as 50.6 percentage points in Italy and Bulgaria.
Data showed that as of September 2025, FTTH/B adoption ranged from just 13.8% in Germany and 16.7% in Greece to 83.6% in France and 90% in Spain. Yet Opensignal stressed that this does not capture the full fixed broadband picture in markets where cable, modern fixed wireless or upgraded copper play important roles.
The analyst also highlighted that coverage according to the European Commission’s VHCN (Very High Capacity Network) framework reached 82.5% of EU households in 2024, compared with its reported figure for FTTP coverage of 69.2%. This, said Opensignal, reflected the continued role of modern cable and other high-capacity networks in several markets, and highlights that gigabit-capable availability is somewhat ahead of active full-fibre footprint.
All of this meant Europe had several different access-layer realities. Spain and France were the clearest fibre-advanced markets, with very high FTTH/B adoption and limited remaining copper dependence. Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the UK retain the highest share of cable/hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) base among the included markets (estimated at >15% of broadband connections), meaning cable remains large enough to influence pricing, competitive dynamics and the pace of migration to full-fibre.
France speeds ahead
Among the European markets, France stood out with the highest average speeds at 182.5Mbps download and 135.3Mbps upload, while Norway reached 132.8Mbps down and 98.6Mbps up, and Spain 118.6Mbps down and 87.3Mbps up. These more symmetrical download and upload outcomes were said to be consistent with markets where fibre has become a much larger part of the fixed broadband base.
By contrast, more asymmetric profiles remain visible in HFC-legacy markets – such as the UK at 119Mbps down and 39.4Mbps up, and Germany at 76.8Mbps down and 27.5Mbps up.
Opensignal noted that many HFC-legacy markets sit towards the higher end of this adoption gap, underlining how the continued presence of cable can slow migration onto fibre. Where existing cable or upgraded copper connections remain good enough for everyday needs, many households did not feel a strong reason to switch.
The industry was also seen as creating an “overshoot market”, offering extreme multi-gigabit capabilities that exceed what the average consumer currently needs or is willing to pay extra for. Unless a household consists of gamers or other heavy data users, the technical superiority of fibre did not translate into an attractive selling proposition over the existing packages.
In addition, the study also showed that fibre-led markets have delivered faster, more symmetrical speeds, but not always better overall experience. The data showed a weaker relationship between FTTH/B adoption and consistent quality of broadband, highlighting the role of non-fibre infrastructure and in-home Wi-Fi conditions in shaping broadband performance.
Europe’s most fibre-advanced markets, France and Spain, demonstrate Consistent Quality scores of 79.7% and 78%, below those seen in Denmark at 85.3%, Norway at 84.3% or Sweden at 81.5% – where in-home Wi-Fi experience comes into play as the explanatory link.
Moreover, Opensignal said the quality bottleneck issue has moved inside the home. It added that the micro-frictions created by poor Wi-Fi environment inside the home have a much stronger impact on overall connectivity experience, more so than the headline throughput capacity. Newer routers, better spectrum use, lower interference and stronger in-home coverage all translate into a better everyday user experience.
The data revealed that markets where operators focus on providing customers with the latest Wi-Fi gateways were achieving stronger consistent quality. While fibre can raise the ceiling of broadband performance, the experience users actually feel is shaped by the Wi-Fi layer: router quality, device capability, band usage, interference, household layout and whether users remain stuck on older Wi-Fi generations.
The biggest practical uplift comes from moving users off congested 2.4GHz connections and onto 5GHz or 6GHz, the latter as delivered by Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi7 technology.
The burden on home networks was also seen to be rising. Households are connecting more smart home devices, and the progressively growing data demands create congestion on the Wi-Fi that is coming not only from within the home, but also from the neighbouring networks and offices.
