Slashdot Mirror
164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide
prostoalex writes "164 million people on this planet have a broadband connection, ZDNet reports, with 52 million broadband lines sold between March 2004 and March 2005. USA, China, UK, Japan and France currently lead the world in number of broadband hookups available. Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club."
Its great to see the penetration of broadband connections increasing, as it gives increasingly more options to content creators and brings back some of the end-to-end nature of the original vision of the internet. I think the next big challenge will be to roll out 10mpbs+ synchronous level connections to users, allowing the next major stage of development into realtime streaming video and give more flexibility to end users. I think a big increase in bandwidth might lead to interestinig innovations in content distribution to end users, and unexpected new applications.
Business Voyeur
"As of September 2004, more than 50% of US internet users have broadband (including DSL) at home."
Per user, or per household?
Does "home" include college dorms?
Same with Windows XP, and the resolution of 1024x768 and above.
Per household or per workstation? Just home or also offices?
"and the resolution of 1024x768 and above."
Per household or per television in use?
Hello, this is the Internet calling, this is not a fad. The future is waiting for you to realize that it's here.
Hmm. World population, about 6,532 million. Broadband users, 164 million. That's 2.5%... I forget, is that an A- or a B+?
You do sort of have to account for families as opposed to individuals. I have not idea what the world-wide actual family size average is but let's say it was four, that would make the stat closer to 10% which actually seems pretty high considering the conditions in a great many countries.
http://www.busyweather.com/
One home, one work, municipal wireless, coffeeshop wireless...
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Hang up on 1994. We don't want the "information superhighway". The internet is important, 1994's information superhighway was some stupid politician's dream.
About 12.1 million internet connections in Canada, and yes, about 5 million broadband connections in use. Canada has the highest broadband penetration in the world. Canada also has the highest Cellular/PCS penetration in the world, and the highest sattelite/digital TV penetration.
To put things in perspective, we switched to broadband in 1994 (ISDN, cable in 1996), my folks have had a cell phone since 1985 (I'm 24, but I got my first cell phone in 1997), and I switched to StarChoice in 1998.
Canada has always been an early adopter of new technology. Coupled with a relatively small population (33 million or so) that's mostly living in a handful of urban centers and a very large middle class, and you've got a recipe for high penetration of services like these.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
And, at last count, maybe 10% of those broadband connections have a router/firewall in front of them, and probably about 40% or more are connected to zombied Windows boxen that are spamming and otherwise causing havoc. This is why Cable/DSL companies suck, they should charge an extra 2 dollars a month for the first year, and give every customer a router (and install it for them).
not broadband penetration. Broadband technology may matter to us nerds, but half the population of the UK doesn't use the net. I imagine many other countries are the same. These people need to get on the net by any means necessary, so a nice cheap dialup connection is a very good idea, even if it is slow. Once they get used to the idea, then perhaps they'll move up to broadband.
It's important for society in the long run to encourage technological laggards to get connected. Increasing the speed of already connected users is great, but is less significant.
Yes... NZ broadband prices have started to drop in the last year or two (enough to finally get me off dialup), but they're still too expensive. A 1Mbit connection with 1Gb cap is still more expensive than dialup was ten years ago...