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164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide

Posted by timothy on from the when-alabama-gets-the-bomb dept.

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."

2 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Prices? by qda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. Re:That's it? by Scott+Tracy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.