According to a report from Point Topic there are more than 600 million broadband subscribers today – that’s worldwide. I must admit I don’t know a ton about Point Topic. They haven’t defined broadband in the teaser summary, but it includes satellite.
It was interesting to see the breakdown of subscribers by method:
Also they appear to be looking at the topic from a market research perspective – so it’s fun to get a glimpse of the business side of broadband…
This represents a 2.7% growth in the first quarter of 2012 and 11.5% in the 12 months since Q1 2011. This is primarily due to the invigorating addition of markets and countries where penetration is yet to achieve the level of the ‘mature’ countries and allows for faster initial growth.
Even markets like India and China aren’t bottomless however and there are signs that countries worldwide are entering a new phase where customer acquisition will be driven primarily by churning current subscribers from their existing supplier. …
The dominant story in access technologies continues to be FTTx, representing the various hybrid combinations of fibre and local loop solutions. The cost effectiveness, from the operators point of view, and the significant increase in bandwidth over DSL in particular is hitting the sweet spot at the moment. FTTH is growing well from a small base but deployments are limited in most markets. …
If we look at the market share change over the last 12 months we can see more clearly how Fibre is taking share from cable and DSL in particular. Consumers are churning away from DSL to the higher bandwidth products where available, but in some ways they are eating their own lunch. …
Satellite and mobile, as a primary home connection, are making inroads into the unserved market and as such theoretically have a better theatre to operate in with plenty of headroom and less competition than the fixed line areas.
