The worldwide number of households with fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband connections, will grow at an annual rate of more than 30% through 2012, and reach 89 million by that time.

FTTH technology currently accounts for some 20 million connections globally, and is expected to expand quickly in Asia. This continent alone is expected to have some 54 million FTTH-connected households by the end of 2012, followed by Europe/Middle East/Africa with 16 million, and North and South America with 15 million.

"The transition to FTTH is now well underway in many countries, including Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Taiwan and the US," said Heavy Reading analyst and report author, Graham Finnie. "Over the next five years, we expect most other developed countries to join that list, and fiber will also have a significant impact in relatively less developed telecom markets, including India, Russia and the Middle East."

"On the telco side, our five-year scenario points to a market that is increasingly dominated by incumbent telco investment, but there is plenty of room for other types of operators, including utilities, municipalities, CLECs, real-estate developers, and others," Finnie added. "On the vendor side, it is already clear that the winners and losers will not be the same as those that dominated the DSL market, but again the picture is complicated, in particular by a likely upswing in M&A activity as FTTH deployment grows and smaller vendors are snapped up by the majors."