The European Commission's Communications Committee has just published a new report into European broadband access accross its 27 member states to July 2008. It reveals that the EU is now home to 107.6m fixed broadband lines, 85.8m of which were dominated by DSL (ADSL, SDSL etc.) technology, with the rest being predominantly cable modem connections and some satellite, wireless and FTTH links.

At EU level the fixed penetration rate, which measures the number of broadband lines per 100 population, is 21.7%, up 3.5% from a year ago (18.2%). The UK places fifth for penetration with 27.5%, behind Finland on 30.7%, Sweden on 32.5%, Netherlands on 35.8% and Denmark tops the list with 37.4%. Broadband lines in general have increased by 19.3% (+17.4m) over the past 12 months. Interestingly the UK comes in second for total number of lines with 16.71m, while Germany tops all with 21.6m!:


Interestingly the report defines broadband lines as "those with capacity equal to or higher than 144 Kbit/s" (0.14Mbps), which many readers would probably regard as being laughably slow. Never the less, 62.0% of EU broadband lines are in the advertised speed range of 2Mbps and below 10Mbps (83.1% UK), 25.1% are in the range of 144Kbps and below 2Mbps (10.5% UK), whereas just 12.8% are in the range of speeds beyond 10Mbps (6.4% UK).

There are also 34m Mobile Broadband connections in the EU, though sadly this data does NOT include France, the Netherlands and the UK which have not reported. That's a shame because the UK is currently a boom market, with Three (3) alone being home to 700,000 Mobile Broadband subscribers. The full report can be DOWNLOADED HERE in .pdf format.