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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

In Poland

[Jozer99]

In solviet bloc Poland, broadband hooks up you!