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.
