The Broadband Forum has released its latest worldwide broadband and IPTV (Internet TV) statistics for Q3-2010, which are sourced from Point Topic data. The results found that the world is now home to 508,761,837 broadband subscriptions, which is up by +2.88% (+14.3m lines) on Q2-2010. The overall year on year growth rate was 6.7%.

The first three quarters of 2010 are characterized by uneven growth patterns, although China and India reported their second best quarters ever and other developing broadband markets showed over 20% growth in the last 12 months (Russia, Vietnam, Ukraine and the Philippines).


The UK managed to retain its 6th position, just a hair behind France, in the Top 10 Broadband Countries (see chart - above). However Europe as a whole witnessed most of its big gains coming from Eastern Europe, which helped the continent perform better in 2010 than in 2009 on a quarter by quarter basis. This is expected to continue for 2011.


Elsewhere it will come as no surprise that DSL ( ADSL etc.) remains the dominant broadband technology worldwide and holds 63.42% of the market. Cable ( Cable Modem / DOCSIS3 ) based operators, such as Virgin Media UK, came in second with 20.41%. Fibre Optic ( FTTH ) based broadband connections also managed to grow from 13% in Q1-2010 to 13.74% in Q3-2010 (6 months), taking a small nibble out of DSL and Fixed Wireless services.

In theory broadband connection growth in Europe, especially through fibre optic lines, should pick up pace between 2011 and 2012 as UK ('Britain's Superfast Broadband Future') and EU ('Digital Agenda') strategies to improve broadband access and speeds start to have an impact.

As for Internet based Television services, IPTV subscribers worldwide now stand at 41,892,171, representing a growth of 7.3% (2.846 million net adds in the quarter) in the three months to the end of September 2010 and 36.7% growth in the last 12 months (11.256 million net adds).

France has one of the strongest IPTV market's in Europe, with most other European countries being barely visible. This should improve over the next few years as new broadband networks are developed and new IPTV platforms, such as YouView in the UK, begin to come online during 2011-2012.