Mystery behind the French homes passed

As I pointed out a few months back when ARCEP released its numbers, there was some confusion about the number of 600.000 connected homes (raccordables). It was hard to understand whether these homes could indeed subscribe to the service or not. I originally suspected some confusion between homes passed and homes connected, but when I emailed ARCEP about it they curteously answered that these were indeed homes connected.

This morning someone who is "in the know" clarified that number for me. The 600.000 homes considered to be connected are homes within MDUs where a vertical deployment contract has been signed by the landlord or building manager. But it does not mean that the vertical deployment has been done, neither does it mean that the horizontal fiber network actually connects the building.

In other words, this number doesn't tell us much except that French operators are not so much late in selling their fiber services as they are in actually deploying the infrastructure...