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."

Comments

Only the first in many steps

[Sv-Manowar]

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.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[bluGill]

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.

We need to focus on internet penetration

[Bad to the Ben]

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.