More than 500M subscribers to broadband lines
Broadband passed 500M subscribers globally in June, the milestone being revealed as the Broadband Forum provided its global Broadband and IPTV Industry Update at its quarterly meeting in Hong Kong, on Monday.
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This is an extremely significant milestone and it reflects the critical importance of broadband in our daily lives, both for business and leisure. The Forum is already looking ahead to the next half billion lines and the challenges and opportunities that such rapid global growth can present”, Robin Mersh, Chief Executive Officer of the Broadband Forum, said.
The new figures show that global broadband subscribers reached 498 million lines (497,768,162) by the end of June 2010, representing a 2.63% growth in the quarter and 11.99% in the last 12 months to end of Q2 2010.
Broadband growth continues in all regions. China is the powerhouse of global broadband so far, being “responsible” for 43% of all net broadband lines added in Q2 2010 and performed far better than the same quarter in 2009. In Western Europe, many markets did better than the equivalent 2009 quarter, as Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Turkey, amongst others, reported strong numbers.
In what concerns Central and South American markets, they cooled to an extent but many are still reporting good quarterly growth (in the 5%-7% range). In North America, the USA and in particular Canada, the markets significantly slowed and – in Canada’s case – to levels not seen for a decade.
Continuing the trend from previous quarterly figures, Asia increased its share of the overall broadband market, accounting now for almost 41% of the total, with Europe in second place – 30% and the Americas on third – 26%.
China is the biggest individual contributor to the Asian growth.
Elsewhere in the top 10 the real movement is from Russia and Brazil, with Russia likely to overtake Brazil in the next three to six months and become the 9th largest broadband market.
The number of subscribers also grew in what concerns IPTV also, with over 2.3 million new IPTV subscribers, making over 38.5 million people using IPTV world-wide by the end of Q2 2010. The growth is in line with broadband growth.
Europe is the most established region for IPTV, with almost 19 million subscribers (from which almost half in France), followed by China and USA.