Point Topic has issued its latest global broadband statistics summary to 30th June 2005, which shows a worldwide total of 176.3m lines, up 16% (24.3m) from 31st December 2004. The growth is slower than in previous years, a trend that is expected to continue.

The 176.3m total can be divided between the worlds three main regions - Asia-Pacific (42%), Americas (28%) and Europe/EMEA (30%). The EMEA proved to be the leading region, adding 9.5m lines in the first half of 2005 to achieve a 30% share.

DSL continued to pull ahead of cable modems, growing by 18.2%, while cable modem and other technologies achieved a growth rate of only 12.0% from Q4 2004. The DSL share of world broadband lines is still a dominant 65% compared to 35% of lines provided by cable modem and other technologies.

The USA remains the largest broadband market with over 38.2m lines, with China in second place reaching 30.8m lines and Japan third with 20.7m lines. South Korea is some way behind with just over 12.3m lines, but is now being gained on by the bigger Western European countries - France, UK and Germany, which have all passed or are soon to pass 8m lines.

France with 8.3m lines is ahead of the UK (8m lines) and Germany (7.9m lines) now being the largest European broadband market. The UK having added over 1.9m lines since 31 Dec 2004 has overtaken Germany in Q2 2005. Given its higher quarterly growth rate in 2005, the UK is also in a good position to overtake France by the end of 2005.

To break things up, the UK currently has:

2.3m Cable Lines
5.7m DSL Lines

Some 13.7% (7,961,938) of the British population subscribe to broadband services.