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

This is the Internet Calling

[drewzhrodague]

Hello, this is the Internet calling, this is not a fad. The future is waiting for you to realize that it's here.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[FLEB]

I'm sorry, can I call you back? I've got 1994 on the other line, and it's just livid about wanting something-or-other back. I'll talk to you when I get this all sorted out.

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.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[erick99]

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.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[FLEB]

One home, one work, municipal wireless, coffeeshop wireless...

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.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

[KillerBob]

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.

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:Only the first in many steps

[aaarrrgggh]

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.

Are you one of those people that believes in flash for delivering web content?!

I'm happy with my DSL, thank you. I don't want to have to upgrade to FTTP just to browse the web, thank you.

Poland, too?

[hunterx11]

Fortunately it seems that the internets have not forgotten Poland.

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.

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?

Re:Prices?

[Jacer]

Internet 2 is for research facilities only. Universities don't want your zombie subnets chewing up their much needed bandwidth.

Re:Prices?

[interiot]

I don't have the link right now, but I remember seeing a graph of bandwidth prices for very large ISP's, for the backbone, or even colo bandwidth prices. Prices in those markets ARE decreasing over time, but at a much slower rate than, say, CPU speed or CPU cost. (bandwidth demand is indeed still growing fairly quickly, but prices are falling much slower) I tried to figure out WHY exactly bandwidth costs don't fall faster, but couldn't find much, because all the analyst types are so busy talking about the glut of fiber optic lines at the end of the 90's.

Re:As of 2004

[Guppy06]

"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?

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: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.

Error in the summary

[bowloframen]

According to the article, USA, China, UK, Japan and France lead the world in broadband lines added in 2005 Q1. For overall number of broadband lines, the leaders are USA, China, Japan, South Korea, and France in order.

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.

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.

Re:We need to focus on internet penetration

[greggman]

You don't need cheap dialup, you need cheap broadband. Here in Japan broadband took of the moment it became cheaper than dialup.

Since then it got even cheaper still when they added VoiP. In fact it's cheaper to sign up for boardband and only use it for your phone than it is to get a normal phone line. You don't need a computer to use the VoiP phone either, just plug your current phone in the back of the ADSL for Fibre modem.

In Poland

[Jozer99]

In solviet bloc Poland, broadband hooks up you!

The Internets

[Doc Ruby]

Why US Broadband Access Lags Other Countries

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...

Per Capita is a better mark

[namhash]

The USA is only at 12.5% per capita according to the stats. Canada sits at over 18%.

Re:Per capita

[dajak]

I would be surprised if countries like South Korea and Sweden wouldn't be ranked among the top nations.

They are:

1. South Korea
2. The Netherlands
3. Denmark
4. Hong Kong
5. Canada
6. Switzerland
7. Israel
8. Taiwan
9. Norway
10. Sweden

The US of A is nowhere to be seen.