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The Internet IT

164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide 154

Posted by timothy 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."
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164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide More

164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide

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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 right along the lines of what I was going to post. I would be more interested in knowing % land mass covered rather than total connections. Sheer size of a country could put them on the top of this list even if they had 2% covered.
    • 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
        • Canada also has the highest Cellular/PCS penetration in the world, and the highest sattelite/digital TV penetration.

          Are you sure? Come on, lets see some numbers. If it's true, then it's marginal when compared with say, the UK.
        • Do the stats take into account disconnects or are they really counting current active subscribers? If about half of the population is subscribed to broadband and not everyone subscribes to it who lives in an area with it available, wouldn't that mean that approximately 75%+ of the country would be blanketed with it? If so that is truly amazing and I commend the telecoms in Canada for accomplishing this. Then again maybe the lines that go down in hard freezes means they have constant replacement of good c
      • >> 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.
    • 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.htm / [statcan.ca]

      According to the stats shown we have 5,000,000 million ACTIVE high speed hook-ups.

      http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=8160/ [zdnet.com]

      I just don't buy that HALF of the households in Canada have active high speed internet connectivity. Availability, yes. But active. No.

      • I believed you the first time you told us. Sheesh! :)
      • I believe it. Here in Manitoba, it's generally cheaper to get broadband connectivity than dial-up. 128/128kbit DSL or cable at $27/mo is cheaper than $15-$20/mo plus tying up your phone line all the time. Even rurally, high speed internet is available to most average sized towns.

        Also, if the population:dwellings ratio holds, the number of dwellings should've increased to over 12M since the 1996 census is 9 years old. Stats Canada has estimated the population of Canada to be over 32 million at this poin

  • As of September 2004, more than 50% of US internet users have broadband (including DSL) at home. Same with Windows XP, and the resolution of 1024x768 and above. All three are now the most common things, thanks to 2004!

    • Re:As of 2004 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 )
      "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!

  • 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.

  • Poland, too? (Score:4, Funny)

    by hunterx11 ( 778171 ) <hunterx11@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Sunday June 26, 2005 @08:42PM (#12917302) Homepage Journal
    Fortunately it seems that the internets have not forgotten Poland.
    • Fortunately it seems that the internets have not forgotten Poland.
      It's internetii.
    • Poland has about 38,6 million citizens. 1 million broadband lines. That's about 2,6% of the population.

      Contrast that with:

      US: 295,7 million citizens, 36,5 million broadband lines. 12,3% of their population.

      Some "big" countries in Europe:

      Switzerland: 7,5 million citizens, 1,4 million broadband lines. 18,6% of their population.

      Italy: 58,1 million citizens, 5,25 million broadband lines. 9% of their population.

      UK: 60,4 million citizens, 7,1 million broadband lines. 11,75% of their population.

      Aus

  • That's it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <`gro.h7urt' `ta' `rehtes'> 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. ;)
    • A couple billion of those are still looking forward to getting their first battery powered radio (lacking access to a power grid), or enough to eat.

      KFG
  • 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

    • Maybe to you, but I'd rather deal with cable issues which are the majority of time on my property where I can fix them versus DSL where the majority of time they are on the loop where you're at the mercy of the phone company getting around to fixing it.

      If I had the money, I'd get a T1 and keep my cable as back-up. Just haven't found that 1, 2, 3, etc. 5. profit sequence yet.

  • 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.
      • Pfft. Here at my school, we have an Internet2 connection. And what do we use it for? Well, besides the legitimate uses, there is some closet filetrading that occurs.. full lenght movies at the speed of life.

        We're lucky to have our bandwidth, but I wouldn't exactly call it "much needed". More like "much wanted". I personally am surprised there aren't Internet2 connections (and IPv6, for all of my random computing things) to the home yet.
        • Yeah, we abuse our I2 connection some on campus. shhhh. Don't tell anyone. We don't want it clogged with zombies.

    • 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.
    • And it should also be noted that majority of those "broadband" (pfff) subscribers in Poland are using the option with 128kbps download speed (and 5GB limit). It's called broadband only because technically it is ADSL...but IMHO it doesn't deserve to be called like that (many years ago ISDN in PL was at the same speed & without limits (the only problem: price; you were paying per minute)
    • 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.

      I wonder to what extent it can be caused by dire housing conditions in Poland. When you have a 10-pax family crowded in one 2-bedroom flat (if you think it's too far-fetched, you've obviously never been to Poland), you get already 10 persons with broadband internet if you just connect this one household. In Scandinavia, you might require 5 DSL lines to ac
      • you sir are an asshole. I happened to have grown up in Poland and while it's not exactly the US of A its housing conditions are *at least* as good as in the UK where I live for a number of years before moving to North America. Poland is no economic powerhouse but to claim that its housing conditions are dire is like describing the UK as one big slum.
  • ....In the quest for porn, dial-up just doesn't cut it ;)
  • 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.
    • Well.. it's not that hard to find out ;)

      The USA is still the world's largest broadband country with 36.5 mln lines, and China remains in second place with 28.3 mln lines.

      US - (36,500,000 / 295,734,134 = 0.123) = 12.3%

      China - (28,300,000 / 1,306,313,812 = 0.0216) = 2.16%

      *population data via google search "USA Population" and "China Population" respectively (July 2005 est.)
      • Households would probably be a better measure than population. I assume the US is similar to Canada which has 2.6 persons per household, so that puts US's numbers at 32%. No idea about China, though. I would assume population per dwelling is higher there, but I don't know how much higher.
  • And how many of those are zombies?

  • Bad Security (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And, at last count, maybe 10% of those broadband connections have a router/firewall in front of them, and probably about 40% or more are connected to zombied Windows boxen that are spamming and otherwise causing havoc. This is why Cable/DSL companies suck, they should charge an extra 2 dollars a month for the first year, and give every customer a router (and install it for them).
    • 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.
  • Let's break it down. 164,000,000 is the key number here. Now as we all know, a number must be Fully Rounded to make news. At first glance 000,000 seems to qualify the number. However we have all seen the last six digits of the number of broadband subscribers roll over 163 times before so it is not important, therefore we must examine the MSD's of the attempt to interest us. We have 164. Is this round, or at least a prime number? No. Since God speaks to us only in round numbers of His majesty we must therefo

  • And Thank God for that! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Sunday June 26, 2005 @09:44PM (#12917534) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Questions (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1) What constitutes broadband? Here in NZ, 256k up / 128k down is "broadband"..

    2) How common is data capping? 10Gb is a common limit here, after which the connection is limited to 64kbps.
    • In the states, i know that right now that Verizon is rolling out fiber optic connections. At 50 USD, I have a 15 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload.

  • What? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought South Korea was completely wired with GB connections.

    you'd think there'd be some sort of award for having government support in the quest
  • Forgive me if I seem rude, but we've got to get those fuckers signed up on Empornium.

    And to stay ontopic, I think 20-30 years from now, we'll be the ones telling our kids, "why when I was your age, we had 4 computers in the whole school with internet access. not only that but it was at 24K shared, and we had to congure WinSock on our own with nothing more than a command line. and if we wanted to play doom it took a week of preparation, and 2 hours of cable switching to get it to work. and it took 45 second

    • Re:Damn! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're not very old, are you? :)

  • 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.

  • In Poland (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Sunday June 26, 2005 @10:24PM (#12917744)
    In solviet bloc Poland, broadband hooks up you!
  • I wonder how many of the subscribers are satisfied?

    I'm hitchiking on my neighbor's wireless at the moment, because Comcast has let me down yet again. Last Friday they disconnected me accidentally, and can't fix it until Monday (and I live in Silicon Valley, not somewhere hard to reach). From my point of view, they're another monopolistic phone type company with abyssmal customer service. Sure, I can get a DSL line, but it's under 1Mbps at my location. There are no other broadband providers available t

    • 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.

  • 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.coder@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...
    • actual broadband (connection speed at or above 1.5 Mbps)

      Where did you get that number from? I thought the accepted floor was 384k. A couple years ago 768k was the cat's pajamas, and many DSL connections MAX OUT at 1.5M if you're adjacent to the CO.
      • ...[i]Standardization Sector (ITU-T) recommendation I.113 has defined broadband as a transmission capacity that is faster than primary rate ISDN, at 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s.[/i]...

        Taken from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]... I just thought it was widely known :) In Denmark I think they say that true broadband starts at 2 Mbps...
        • A couple of years ago, in Sweden, broadband was defined as >= 512 kbit/s, but now we have switched to the definition "always online", which at least I think is a better definition.
  • 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
  • Not too many in Asia, though. One of my Indian friend told me that he got 'broadband'. I was surprised to see that his speed was 128kbps.
  • 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
  • I was wondering how fast is your connection in your country ?

    Here in France, the average would be a 2 MBits/s, I think (with up to 20 MBits for about 1 million people)

    And you ?
  • China is the second largest in the number of users on Broadband. Wonder what all these users do online with so many of their activities censored/monitored (blogs, email, sites).

    Am I wrong to infer that the attempts of the Chinese government to censor internet access are not really effective. Either that or the chinese have gotten used to the restrictions and are satisfied with playing within the limits.

    I would have taken the latter for granted except that my web server logs told a completely different
  • Having just got back from the States and being used to being able to get 4M/384k DSL or cable *ANYWHERE* it's a little annoying that I am offered a wonderful 8M/400k ADSL by some companies, and then told that the line cannot sustain 2M/256k so they can't help me, but I can get 512K/128k from BT for the same price (please note this is not in the middle of a field somewhere, this is a mile from a big city).

    And even the three people in London who do qualify for the 8meg service only get about 3meg in reality
    • So after being away for 4 years, Britain is still in the same place as far as broadband goes, and that's the Dark Ages!

      It's not only as far as broadband goes that England is in the Dark Ages!

      *babum-tsshh!!*

      Disclaimer: I am well aware that during the Dark Ages England was one of the most sophisticated places in the world, and that the subsequent Norman Invasion plunged England into a backward period that kept it on the margins of European culture until the end of the Middle Ages. However, despite the r
  • Make that 164,000,001.
  • Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club.

    Just so you know, because some Pole might slap you in the face otherwise:

    Poland isn't and never was a part of "Eastern Europe". "Eastern Europe" is synonym for Byzantium/Orthodox Church (among other things) while Poland was always Roman Catholic country.

    Poland for a short period of time was a part of the "Eastern Block", but it was always located in "Central Europe", just like Austria or Czech Republic.

    Robert
    • What makes a country east or west europe? I mean what physical landmark.
      • Not really a physical, it was always a cultural difference. Central and West Europe was always a culture built around Roman Catholic church, and Roman-Latin rite and culture. Later of course some of the countries switched to Protestant denomiations.

        Eastern Europe was built around Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantium-Greek Culture. Greek-Catholic (Uniate) Church, in some EE countries (Belarus and Ukraine) is today formally part of the Roman-Catholic Church, but culturally and ritually is still part of the
  • I was the 164 millionth.

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