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400 million users worldwide are now on broadband, with almost 100 million joining up in the past year alone.
400 million users are now on some form of broadband, analyst firm Point Topic said.
Oliver Johnson, senior analyst at the firm, said the company had been researching broadband since 1998.
“When Point Topic started researching broadband in 1998 it was still mostly in the technical trial stage. Getting to 400 million subscribers in the 10 years since then has been one of the fastest rollouts of a major new technology the world has ever seen,” said Oliver Johnson, senior analyst at Point Topic.
In 1998 there were 57,200 users on broadband, which increased to over 280,000 in 1999. Since then, the uptake of broadband has increased by more than 600,000 per cent.
The most common form of broadband is still the Digital Subscriber Line, with technologies like ADSL and ADSL2, but the uptake of fibre optic has grown. 18,000 users subscribed to a fibre optic service in 2002, but there are now four million on fibre optic today.
“The last 14 years have seen immense changes in the broadband industry, from the initial development stages to the explosion of different access technologies and the sophisticated applications we see today,” said George Dobrowski, president of the Broadband Forum, which commissioned the research.
Last year Point Topic announced that the total of broadband subscribers reached 300 million, seeing an increase of almost 100 million users in the past year alone.
Source:
IT News
