The good news: 14 countries now have have more than 1% of households directly hooked up to a fibre connection. The not quite so good news: there are no new entries in the rankings.
There has been some jostling for position with Taiwan, Slovenia and Iceland all moving up the ranks, and the US slipping a few places.
The Asian region now accounts for more than 27 million of the world's estimated 32 million FTTH connections. South Korea has nearly 37% of its households connected to fibre, with Hong Kong at 27%, Japan at 24% and Taiwan at 7.7%.
By counting penetration rather than total number of households, the rankings try to take into account the effect of the size of a country. This can make a huge difference. While the People's Republic of China only ranked 11th in terms of market penetration, growth in the number of connections to 7.5 million means that China is now second only to Japan in the number of households with FTTH.
The US is third overall in terms of absolute numbers, with a grand total of 3.3 million homes connected with fibre, which corresponds to 2.9% of households. The US continues to experience the highest rate of growth of any economy in terms of FTTH subscribers. This is due largely to an aggressive FTTH deployment by market leader Verizon, as well as ongoing FTTH build-outs by more than 600 smaller providers across the country.
Yet despite all this activity, the US slipped down two places to 10th in the global rankings. That's because a large country like the US has to work a lot harder to boost its penetration, compared with a small country like, say, Portugal.
Europe put on a good showing if you just consider its position in the table. Four Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Denmark) and Slovenia occupied the fifth through ninth positions in the ranking, with market penetration ranging from 7.5% to 3.2%. The Netherlands and Italy were in the 12th and 13th positions, each with market penetration of 1.4%.
But despite having seven countries in the rankings, Europe accounts for just 1.4 million connections — not quite so impressive.
Joeri Van Bogaert, president of the FTTH Council Europe, notes that large FTTH projects now underway in France and Germany, as well as deployments in other EU countries such as Greece and Portugal, could boost Europe's show in the rankings in the near future.
But he needs to keep lobbying hard if Europe is to meet the target of a 10-fold increase in the number of fibre subscribers to 8 million by 2012 that the FTTH Council Europe set last year (see Europe puts FTTH firmly on the agenda).
Speaking of Portugal, earlier this month the Portuguese government set the target of 1 million FTTH connections by 2010, which corresponds to around 10% of households. There is every indication that this will be achieved as carriers Sonaecom and Portugal Telecom have both announced aggressive investment plans for FTTH.