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164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide

Posted by timothy on Sun Jun 26, 2005 08:32 PM
from the when-alabama-gets-the-bomb dept.
The Internet IT
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."
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164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide 50 Comments More /

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  • 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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by FLEB (312391) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:47PM (#12917329) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • Hello, this is the Internet calling, this is not a fad. The future is waiting for you to realize that it's here.

      Hmm. World population, about 6,532 million. Broadband users, 164 million. That's 2.5%... I forget, is that an A- or a B+?
      • 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.
    • 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.
      • One home, one work, municipal wireless, coffeeshop wireless...
      • 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 alwa
      • >> I just don't buy that HALF of the households in Canada have active high speed internet connectivity.

        I think most urban households have DSL lite available at about 5 bucks more than "good" dial-up

        5 Million doesn't seem high to me. With few exceptions, everyone I know has highspeed.

  • Only the first in many steps (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar (772313) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:38PM (#12917285) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.
      • Then stay there. No one cares about what *you* want in any way, shape, or form. Seriously, way to think ahead. I mean, shit, horses and sail boats can get you anywhere in the world, right? Fuck those Wright brothers, fiddling with shit and ruining a good thing.
  • Fortunately it seems that the internets have not forgotten Poland.

  • That's it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xzzy (111297) <sether@NOSPAm.tru7h.org> on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:46PM (#12917324) Homepage
    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? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Scott Tracy (317419) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:57PM (#12917366)
      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.
      • "half of those households must be in India, China and Africa."

        China is one of the leaders (as mentioned in the headline). They have what 1.3 billion people, and 94M Internet users [internetworldstats.com] (not sure of the broadband -vs- dialup ratio). I don't think they are quite in the same league as India and Africa. I would guess the density is much higher than 2.5:1 per household as well like you say, but I could be wrong.

        Sorry to nitpick. ;)
  • Which I'd explain by the competition among DSL providers and (mostly) lack thereof among Cable guys.

    Interestingly, there is no municipal WiFi mentioned...

    • I live in Richmond, IN, and the local electric company Richmond Power & Light [rp-l.com] 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 comin

  • Prices? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by qda (678333) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:47PM (#12917333) Homepage
    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? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jacer (574383) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:55PM (#12917360) Homepage
      Internet 2 is for research facilities only. Universities don't want your zombie subnets chewing up their much needed bandwidth.
      • Actually, it's supposed to be reserved for universities and some corporations until the bugs can get worked out, plus a reserved period to allow them to utilize it while the rest of the world's hardware gets ramped up. However, since it *is* being managed by government and higher education, it's no surprise that it hasn't been rolled out for the masses yet.

    • Re:Prices? (Score:3, Informative)

      by interiot (50685)
      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 th
    • What are you talking about? I'm in Canada. I used to pay $44.95 for 3mbs connection just over a year ago. Now with a purchase of a $99 modem, I'm gettimg a 5mbs connection for $46.95. That's an increase of $2 a month for a 2mbs increase.
    • I don't know about that. I just signed my life away to SBC Yahoo! for their bottom-tier residential DSL service. I don't care about speed so much as always-on reliability, and the 1.5/384 max rates I get are more than good enough for pretty much anything. The total cost is $25/month, and $10 of that is for phone service. [I include that, because I wouldn't have it otherwize. My primary phone is cellular.] Ten years ago you would be lucky to get basic POTS Internet for that much, and it would likely ha

  • Poland's broadband... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MSBob (307239) on Sunday June 26 2005, @08:53PM (#12917353)
    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.

    • Zlotys??? Isn't Poland part of the Union yet?
      • Membership of the EU doesn't imply acceptance of Euro as your country's currency. Some countries opted out of Euro (the UK for example) others will join the single currency in the next year or two (Poland is going to be in that group). For now all the new EU members elected to retain their original currencies for the time being.
    • Don't forget out limits. I moved down to Krakow recently, and got the telco's (TPSA) 2MB/s package which has a whopping 35GB/month limit. Good thing I left a mac mini hooked up to my astercity 1mb/s cable, unlimited connection up in Warsaw.
  • 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.
  • The chart comparing U.S. to China is impressive as is, but I'd be curious to see one showing broadband as a % of population than just # of households.
  • 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bad to the Ben (871357) on Sunday June 26 2005, @10:19PM (#12917723)
    not broadband penetration. Broadband technology may matter to us nerds, but half the population of the UK [bbc.co.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.
    • 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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jozer99 (693146) on Sunday June 26 2005, @10:24PM (#12917744)
    In solviet bloc Poland, broadband hooks up you!
  • Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club.

    We almost forgot about them.

  • The Internets (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Sunday June 26 2005, @10:53PM (#12917856) Homepage Journal
    Why US Broadband Access Lags Other Countries [able2know.com]

  • Broadband? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daath (225404) <lp@code r . dk> on Sunday June 26 2005, @11:06PM (#12917904) Homepage Journal
    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...
  • I for one welcome our Broadband, highspeed Internet overlords.

    As a part-time dialup user, I'd like to remind Comcast, Shaw, and Rogers that I can be useful in rounding up other 56Kpbs users to toil in their underground technical support call centers.

    Long Live BitTorrent!
  • The USA is only at 12.5% per capita according to the stats. Canada sits at over 18%.
    • And South Korea is by far the world leader with about 80% of the population having broadband access. Honk Kong and Taiwan are also doing well at about 50%.
    • From a TelecomPaper [digital-lifestyles.info] survey:

      "Europe has outrun the Americas for the first time in history and became the second largest broadband market in the world," TelecomPaper noted.

      The addition of broadband to European homes was also greater than Asia and America, growing around twice as fast.

      Leading the European charge were countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark whose broadband connectivity now only trails South Korea by a smidgen.

      "Given the slow growth of South Korea, we expect that the top position, now
  • Many people shop around, which accounts for the multiple 'purchases'. Theres a big difference between advertised and actual throughput, which is the first reason people continue to shop around. The number is higher in countries with broadband competition where people have more to 'test'.

    Unfortunately the installed technologies for all these residential broadband connections have a limit... 4mb/800kbps for DSL and 8mb/1mb for cable. To switch to faster speeds in some newer technologies, you'd have to change
    • "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?
    • In the early nineties, I had an email address, and wanted to put it on my resume. I had a long screaming argument with my father over it. Now, if I don't have an email address -- I don't work!
    • An excellent business decision, that. Make $24 in extra charges, spend over triple that on the hardware and installation. Its amazing the broadband companies haven't thought of it already.
    • The old comcast that was mediaone was terrible. The phone service and politeness was there, but the technology wasn't. I actually got refunds for keeping track of so many downed hours.

      The later AT&T was actually better in technology, but honestly comcast now is by far the best. It's up 95% of the time.

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

      They are [digital-lifestyles.info]:

      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.

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