Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) providers sell much more IPTV in the United States than those selling copper-based services, the head of the Fiber-To-The-Home Council said today. Joe Savage, speaking at a Telecom2008 conference session, said IPTV penetration is 28 percent on average among FTTH deployments, compared to about 20 percent for other IPTV providers.

That number jumps up to 52 percent when Verizon is excluded from the list and the other 543 FTTH deployments in the United States are considered, Savage said.

“There are 200 systems that have 100 percent penetration, because they are planned communities,” he said. Outside that group, penetration varies from 30 percent to 85 percent, which is good enough “to have the accounting departments jumping up and down” because of the return on the major investment that FTTH requires.

Verizon has been hampered by the need to get individual franchise agreements in each area it serves, and, as by far the largest deployer of FTTH, is dragging the national average down.

All this is happening despite the fact that IPTV technology is still relatively immature, and there is no interactive killer application that is driving its deployment, Savage said.

“All triple-play services just work better over fiber,” he said.

In green-field deployments, fiber is now cheaper to deploy because the cost of copper has skyrocketed, Savage added.