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

That's it?

[Xzzy]

164 million out of 6.5 billion? That's 2.5%.

Especially interesting is the degree that many companies today assume users have access to broadband, games especially.

Big as this intarweb thing is, still got a long ways to go. Apparently.

Re:That's it?

[Scott Tracy]

Actually, since it's 164M lines (not people) that really means 164M households. In Canada, there are 12M households, but 30M people. I would wager worldwide the ratio is more like 6:1 than 2.5:1, so let's say roughly that out of 1 billion households 164M have broadband.

I think that's pretty good when you consider half of those households must be in India, China and Africa.

Although slower, DSL is more satisfying

[mi]

Which I'd explain by the competition among DSL providers and (mostly) lack thereof among Cable guys.

Interestingly, there is no municipal WiFi mentioned...

Re:Although slower, DSL is more satisfying

[Door-opening Fascist]

I live in Richmond, IN, and the local electric company Richmond Power & Light was sitting on an ungodly fast SONET ring (655 Mbps). They installed it in the mid '90s in an attempt to get into the CATV business, which flopped in front of the PUC. After years of using it for nothing more than monitoring their power substations over RS-232 (~9600bps for a few dozen substations), they're now getting into the wireless Internet business. They sell equivalents of fractional T1, full T1, and I believe are coming out with a wireless equivalent T3. The reliablity is superior to the reliability on the T1 lines from Verizon. They're just now finishing negotiations with the PUC for rolling out residential wireless access. It's all very cool.

Here's some links.

Prices?

[qda]

This is good, I think, but why have the prices been so stagnant.. at least where I live in Canada.. the cost of broadband has been roughly the same for a long time if i'm not mistaken, and where is Internet 2 that we've heard about that so much faster? Shouldn't the cost be going down with this increase in usage?

Poland's broadband...

[MSBob]

Poland's broadband services is no worse than in Canada or the US. However, the price of broadband still keeps many Poles reliant on dial up. The basic DSL package (512KB/s downstream) from the national telco (TPSA) costs around 100 zlotys while the 2MB/s costs 159 zlotys with tax. An average monthly salary is around 2000 zlotys per month before tax, so unless broadband is high on your list of priorities it's hard to justify it out of your budget.

Poland is also one of the most populous Eastern Europe countries so it's hardly surprising that they were the first to break the 1,000,000 lines target.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[Mistlefoot]

This is reality calling as well.

According the last census in Canada (1996) we have just over 10 million households.

http://www.statcan.ca/english/census96/table1.ht m

According to the stats shown we have 5,000,000 million ACTIVE high speed hook-ups.

I just don't buy that HALF of the households in
Canada have active high speed internet connectivity. Availability, yes. But active. No.

And Thank God for that!

[Matey-O]

As one that got connectes to BBS(es) at 2400 baud, I can't tell you how much I cherish my broadband connection. Having spent $110 a month for ISDN because it was better than 56k, paying $50 a month for cable is a pittance for the return it gives.

Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1) What constitutes broadband? Here in NZ, 256k up / 128k down is "broadband"..

2) How common is data capping? 10Gb is a common limit here, after which the connection is limited to 64kbps.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought South Korea was completely wired with GB connections.

you'd think there'd be some sort of award for having government support in the quest

Broadband?

[Daath]

I wonder how many of those lines are actual broadband (connection speed at or above 1.5 Mbps). I know lots of ISP's marketing 64, 128 and 256 Kbps lines as broadband...