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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."

4 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is the Internet Calling by FLEB · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Information wants to be free.
    Entertainment wants to be paid.
    You just want to be cheap.
  2. 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?

  3. 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.

  4. We need to focus on internet penetration by Bad+to+the+Ben · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.