Posted: 15th Dec, 2006 By: MarkJ
The DSL Forum has released its latest breakdown of global broadband and xDSL (ADSL, SDSL etc.) statistics to 30th September 2006. The UK alone added 2,924,600 million new xDSL subscribers for the 12 month period, bringing the total figure to 9,317,000:
DSLs subscriber base went up to more than 173 million while global broadband subscribers reached more than 263 million in the 12 months to 30 September 2006. Each week, 1.25 million people signed up to broadband according to the latest statistics prepared for the international DSL Forum by industry analyst Point Topic. An additional 65 million people subscribed to broadband in the period with two-thirds of new subscribers choosing digital subscriber line technology (DSL) that delivers broadband over telephone lines.
DSL is by far the most popular broadband access technology in the world at 65.6% market share, rising to 82% in the European Union the worlds largest broadband region.
Of the remaining broadband access technologies, fibre to the home or other close location (FTTx), delivers to ten per cent of the worlds broadband subscribers. Less than one per cent of broadband is delivered by satellite, accounting for less than one million subscribers.
Globally, the largest broadband market in the world is the USA with more than 55.5 million subscribers, followed by China at 48.5 million. Japan in third place has almost 26 million. Together, they account for almost half of all broadband connections across the world.
Global Market Share of Broadband Technologies
Technology - Number of subscribers - % of subscribers
DSL - 173,083,131 - 65.61%
Cable - 60,245,598 - 22.84%
FTTx - 27,019,742 - 10.24%
Other Access Technologies - 2,715,619 - 1.03%
Satellite - 730,192 - 0.28%
Sixteen countries now have over two million DSL subscribers, together representing just under half of all broadband customers using this technology.
Commenting on these latest broadband subscriber figures, Michael Brusca, president of the international DSL Forum said: As the global reach of broadband into peoples lives continues to grow, the range of access technologies used to deliver its benefits is also expanding to capitalise on the various available infrastructures. Even though DSL is the predominant delivery technology in the world, the DSL Forum is working to extend the benefits of our own specifications to be equally applicable for other network technologies and to address the service delivery needs of the ever-growing range of multimedia devices and applications that depend on broadband for their success.
The European Union (EU) added more than 17.3 million xDSL subscribers for the period, reaching a total figure of 60,263,139. Elsewhere the UK continues to hold its place of 6th in the top 20 countries by number of DSL subscribers chart.