Sweden has the highest penetration of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections in Europe, with more than 8 percent of households hooked up to an optical access line at the end of June 2008, according to new figures from the FTTH Council Europe .

In general, the Nordic countries dominate the European FTTH landscape. The continent's most northern states - Iceland (3.9 percent), Denmark (3.1 percent), and Finland (1.7 percent), in addition to Sweden (8.3 percent) and Noorway (7.2 percent) - dominate the top end of the new chart.

This contrasts sharply with the Asia/Pacific region, where South Korea has a 37 percent FTTH penetration rate, Hong Kong boasts 27 percent, and Japan 24 percent. At the end of June, 27 million of the world's 32 million FTTH connections were to be found in Asia.

Europe, meanwhile, had just 1.37 million fiber access connections in service, though Joeri Van Bogaert, president of the FTTH Council Europe, gives the number a positive spin by noting this is up by 52 percent compared with a year earlier.

In terms of actual numbers of FTTH connections, Sweden boasts the most, with nearly 368,000 FTTH homes, followed by Italy with 292,000, Norway with 142,000, and France with 138,000.