Point Topic the international research company, released their latest worldwide broadband statistics in December 2008 and they make for interesting reading. The UK rankings are respectable rather than stellar.
Broadband growth
Overall by Q3 2008 there were approximately 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, up by approximately 16 million subscriptions on the previous quarter.
Western Europe has the largest share of broadband subscribers with 26% of the total, followed by South and East Asia at 23% and North America with 22%.
In terms of broadband penetration (as a % of total population), North America leads with 27% penetration, followed by Western Europe on 26% and Asia Pacific on 10%, but predictably growth rates in less well penetrated markets were far higher. Western Europe’s broadband growth rate over the period was 2.7%, whilst Latin America for example grew at 8.3%.
Big gains in South East Asia
By far the largest absolute volume of new broadband subscribers was acquired in South and East Asia, with over 5 million broadband subscribers added in China in the third quarter of 2008 alone which accounted for one third of the total volume of broadband subscribers added globally and almost twice the number added throughout Western Europe over the same time period.
Within Western Europe 2.7million new subscribers were added, of which over 800,000 were added in Germany; 428,000 in France and 320,000 in the UK. The 320,000 new broadband subscriptions added in the UK ranked ninth in volume terms worldwide, with Brazil, Mexico, Russia and India all adding more broadband subscribers than the UK, in addition to China, USA, Germany and France.
DSL technologies are by far the most common method of receiving broadband worldwide, accounting for 65% of total worldwide connections. This is followed by cable modems accounting for 21% of connections; and fibre to the home or the cabinet (FFTx) accounting for just over 12%.
The Western European market is especially dominated by DSL with a total of 86 million connections, of which 21 million are in Germany, 16 million in France and 13.4 million in the UK. All three are dwarfed by China which has a staggering 62 million DSL subscribers.
China leads
The sheer size of China’s market means that it is now in volume terms the largest broadband market in the world with 80.9 million broadband subscribers, having overtaken the USA (79 million subscribers) in Q3 2008. The UK is back in 6th place by volume, after Japan, Germany and France.
There are some interesting differences in the technologies adopted that will profoundly affect each country’s ability to provide ultra-fast broadband connections in future. DSL connections tend to limit available speeds to approx 40 Mb/sec; whilst “fibre to the cabinet” can offer speeds of nearly 200 Mb/sec; and “fibre to the home” of over 1,000 Mb/sec. These all can be compared to the UK average broadband speed of approx 3.5 Mb/s.
In Japan for example nearly 60% of their 29 million broadband connections are via FFTx resulting in an average broadband speed of over 90 Mb/sec. This is in contrast to the UK where nearly 80% of broadband connections are via DSL. This makes Virgin Media’s decision to invest in FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) broadband services in the UK very timely. The new service which launched at the end of 2008 offers speeds of up to 50Mb/sec.