Carsten Engelke, Director of Technology, ANGA and Dr. Anthony Basham, VP of Active Products EMEA – Head of Netceed DK – CEO at DKT A/S – President SCTE
Recently, Carsten Engelke and Dr. Anthony Basham were guests on Wavelengths, Amphenol Broadband Solutions’ periodic podcast. During their wide-ranging discussion they touched on many topics of interest for the European broadband industry. This article encapsulates some of the highlights of their conversation.
Across Europe, the broadband industry is entering a decisive new chapter. Fibre deployment is accelerating, legacy networks are being reevaluated, and operators are under growing pressure to do more than simply expand coverage. They are being asked to build networks that are faster, smarter, more resilient, more secure, and more sustainable at the same time. Those are not abstract ambitions. They are real questions shaping investment, architecture, operations, and customer experience across the market.
As of 2024, full fibre (FTTP/B) coverage across Europe has exceeded 60%, with leading markets such as Spain and Portugal surpassing 90% availability (FTTH Council Europe; European Commission DESI). This demonstrates both the scale of progress and the increasing divergence between leading and lagging markets (FTTH Council Europe, 2024; European Commission, 2024).
Fibre’s continued rise is one of the clearest themes, but it is hardly the only one. The real story is more complex: Europe is moving toward a fibre-centric future, yet it is doing so unevenly, with different countries, operators, and network models progressing at very different speeds. Some markets are still in heavy buildout mode. Others are already confronting the next set of questions: how to increase take rates, how to manage hybrid infrastructure, how to modernize operations, and how to prepare for the demands that will define the next decade.
This classic tension between ambition and reality requires proper discussion across the whole of Europe. Policymakers want gigabit societies. Operators want scalable returns. Customers want reliable service but do not always feel an urgent need to upgrade. Investors want confidence that network transformation will translate into adoption and long-term value. The result is a market where the destination may be clear, but the path is anything but simple.
A structural paradox is emerging. Public funding and regulatory pressure are accelerating fibre deployment, yet in some markets this leads to overbuild and increased competition on the same infrastructure footprint, which can suppress returns and challenge long-term investment sustainability (BCG 2023; Analysys Mason 2023).
One of the most compelling questions before us is the difference between availability and adoption. Building fibre is one challenge. Convincing homes and businesses to switch is another. In many markets, existing broadband services are still perceived as “good enough,” which means that even where high-performance networks are available, take-up may lag expectations. That gap has serious consequences. It affects business cases, deployment priorities, and the pace at which operators can justify further expansion. It also forces the industry to think harder about what customers truly value: not just speed, but reliability, simplicity, security, and future readiness.
In many European markets, fibre take-up lags availability by 20–40 percentage points (FTTH Council Europe, 2024; Analysys Mason, 2023). This gap is often driven not only by pricing or awareness, but by behavioural inertia—customers tend to upgrade only when a clear service trigger exists, such as improved streaming, home working demands, or bundled offerings (McKinsey, 2023).
For all the momentum around fibre, Europe is not moving from one clean technology era to another overnight. Fibre, HFC, upgraded cable platforms, in-building systems, wireless extensions, and legacy assets will continue to coexist for years. That creates operational complexity, but it also creates opportunity. Operators need architectures and strategies that allow them to evolve without overbuilding unnecessarily or abandoning useful infrastructure before the economics make sense. That is easier said than done, and it is one of the main reasons that the conversation must move beyond headline claims and into the harder questions of deployment and lifecycle planning.
The transition is therefore not purely technological but economic. Fibre networks typically offer lower total cost of ownership over the long term, but require significantly higher upfront capital investment compared to incremental upgrades of HFC or copper networks (Analysys Mason, 2023; BCG, 2023).
As in the past, interoperability and standards remain critical concerns. The broadband ecosystem has learned over time that scale, flexibility, and innovation are strengthened when systems work together cleanly across vendors and environments. In fibre, that goal is still a work in progress. The implications are wide-ranging: procurement complexity, upgrade friction, vendor dependency, and inconsistent operator experiences across markets. The future of broadband will not be shaped only by the speed of new rollouts, but by how effectively the industry builds ecosystems that are interoperable, supportable, and resilient over time.
Then there is resilience itself, a topic that has moved from the background to the center of infrastructure planning. Broadband networks are now foundational to public life, commerce, communications, and critical services. That changes the stakes. Resilience is no longer a nice-to-have but instead must be a design principle. Physical hardening, redundancy, fault visibility, power continuity, cybersecurity readiness, and recoverability all matter more than they once did. The same is true of observability: operators need better insight into what is happening across increasingly distributed and complex environments. When networks become more essential, downtime becomes more consequential.
This shift is also reflected in regulation. Under the EU’s NIS2 Directive (EU 2022/2555), broadband networks are increasingly treated as critical infrastructure, placing greater emphasis on security, resilience, and incident response capabilities. (European Union, 2022; ENISA, 2023)
At the same time, network traffic continues to grow at approximately 25–30% annually, driven by video consumption, cloud services, and emerging applications (Cisco, 2023; Ericsson, 2023). This adds further pressure on network capacity, monitoring, and operational responsiveness.
Cybersecurity and automation are tightly linked as well. Modern networks are too large and dynamic to be monitored manually in the old way. Operators need better tools to detect anomalies, anticipate faults, prioritize incidents, and respond at speed. That is where AI and intelligent automation enter the picture. Not as hype, and not as a replacement for sound engineering judgment, but as a practical layer in planning, operations, maintenance, and security. Used well, these technologies can help reduce truck rolls, identify issues earlier, and support a more proactive operating model. Used poorly, they risk creating new blind spots or overconfidence.
AI-driven observability platforms are increasingly used to analyse network telemetry in real time, but they also introduce new dependencies on data quality, model accuracy, and governance, requiring careful implementation (TM Forum, 2024; Gartner, 2023.
Increasingly inseparable from network strategy is to design with an eye toward sustainability. Fibre is often discussed in terms of bandwidth and longevity, but the environmental dimension matters too. Energy consumption, equipment life cycles, refurbishment, circularity, and e-waste are all part of the broader picture. A future-ready network is not just fast. It must also be maintainable, efficient, and responsible over the long term. Circularity is increasingly a practical lever rather than a theoretical ambition. Extending equipment lifecycles, reducing e-waste, and lowering embodied carbon are becoming essential components of network design and procurement strategies (European Commission, 2020; GSMA, 2023).
Finally, new architectures, new tools, and new expectations require new skills. Workforce readiness, training, and operational consistency are not secondary concerns; they are core to successful transformation. The industry can deploy advanced systems quickly, but if field teams, planners, and operations centers are not equipped to support them, the value of that investment erodes fast. Technology transitions succeed only when people can execute them.
As the broadband industry enters a decisive new chapter across Europe, there are many considerations spanning important topics such as the speed of the network, its resilience and security, how it contributes to sustainability and more. These, and many others, will be part of ongoing discussions that will shape Europe’s coming broadband environment.
The next phase will not be won by speed of rollout alone, but by those who can align infrastructure, economics, resilience, and customer value into a coherent and sustainable model.
Check out the full article in the latest edition of Broadband Journal
Check out the Wavelengths Podcast here
References
Analysys Mason (2023) Fibre deployment and investment sustainability in Europe.
BCG (2023) The Future of Fibre in Europe. Boston Consulting Group.
Cisco (2023) Annual Internet Report.
ENISA (2023) Telecommunications Threat Landscape and Resilience Framework.
Ericsson (2023) Mobility Report.
European Commission (2020) A New Circular Economy Action Plan.
European Commission (2024) Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI).
European Union (2022) Directive (EU) 2022/2555 (NIS2 Directive).
FTTH Council Europe (2024) FTTH/B Market Panorama.
Gartner (2023) AIOps and Network Automation in Telecommunications.
GSMA (2023) Climate Action and Sustainability in Telecoms.
McKinsey & Company (2023) The Future of Connectivity Demand.
TM Forum (2024) Autonomous Networks Framework.
