Posted: 04th Mar, 2010 By: MarkJ

Analysts at Point Topic have estimated that emerging countries, such as several East European and South East Asia states, will over the next five years be the main driver of broadband growth, adding over 14% per year in numbers. By 2014 they will account for over 320m lines, 43% of the world total of 740m by that time.
In broadband terms emerging counties have low take-up but high growth rates. With over 155 million lines by mid-2009 they overtook the youthful countries to become the biggest of the groups. Annual growth in individual countries is expected to range upwards from 9.5% to over 20% in places such as Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as India.

Their average take-up is still only 4.5%, but and with a population of almost 3.5 billion people these countries house huge potential demand which could keep the broadband market growing for decades.
Interestingly Point Topic counts the USA, Japan and several modern European states among its "
youthful countries". The analyst claims that despite such markets existing for as long as almost any others, at least in terms of mass consumer broadband, there is still considerable growth headroom.
Finally the mature countries are all more or less approaching saturation, at least according to current market expectations. The growth rate for the group as a whole is forecast at only 4.6%, which should raise total numbers from 108m in mid 2009 to 139m by the end of 2014.
Even within this group there are some countries showing stronger growth, notably Germany which is forecast to average 6%. And while total broadband numbers will grow only slowly there will be a major shift in this group to next-generation superfast broadband services.