164 Million Broadband Subscribers Worldwide

prostoalex writes "164 million people on this planet have a broadband connection, ZDNet reports, with 52 million broadband lines sold between March 2004 and March 2005. USA, China, UK, Japan and France currently lead the world in number of broadband hookups available. Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club."

This is the Internet Calling

Hello, this is the Internet calling, this is not a fad. The future is waiting for you to realize that it's here.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

I'm sorry, can I call you back? I've got 1994 on the other line, and it's just livid about wanting something-or-other back. I'll talk to you when I get this all sorted out.

Re:This is the Internet Calling

Hang up on 1994. We don't want the "information superhighway". The internet is important, 1994's information superhighway was some stupid politician's dream.

As of 2004

As of September 2004, more than 50% of US internet users have broadband (including DSL) at home. Same with Windows XP, and the resolution of 1024x768 and above. All three are now the most common things, thanks to 2004!

Only the first in many steps

Its great to see the penetration of broadband connections increasing, as it gives increasingly more options to content creators and brings back some of the end-to-end nature of the original vision of the internet. I think the next big challenge will be to roll out 10mpbs+ synchronous level connections to users, allowing the next major stage of development into realtime streaming video and give more flexibility to end users. I think a big increase in bandwidth might lead to interestinig innovations in content distribution to end users, and unexpected new applications.

Poland, too?

Fortunately it seems that the internets have not forgotten Poland.

That's it?

164 million out of 6.5 billion? That's 2.5%.

Especially interesting is the degree that many companies today assume users have access to broadband, games especially.

Big as this intarweb thing is, still got a long ways to go. Apparently.

Re:That's it?

Actually, since it's 164M lines (not people) that really means 164M households. In Canada, there are 12M households, but 30M people. I would wager worldwide the ratio is more like 6:1 than 2.5:1, so let's say roughly that out of 1 billion households 164M have broadband.

I think that's pretty good when you consider half of those households must be in India, China and Africa.

Although slower, DSL is more satisfying

Which I'd explain by the competition among DSL providers and (mostly) lack thereof among Cable guys.

Interestingly, there is no municipal WiFi mentioned...

Prices?

This is good, I think, but why have the prices been so stagnant.. at least where I live in Canada.. the cost of broadband has been roughly the same for a long time if i'm not mistaken, and where is Internet 2 that we've heard about that so much faster? Shouldn't the cost be going down with this increase in usage?

Re:Prices?

Internet 2 is for research facilities only. Universities don't want your zombie subnets chewing up their much needed bandwidth.

Poland's broadband...

Poland's broadband services is no worse than in Canada or the US. However, the price of broadband still keeps many Poles reliant on dial up. The basic DSL package (512KB/s downstream) from the national telco (TPSA) costs around 100 zlotys while the 2MB/s costs 159 zlotys with tax. An average monthly salary is around 2000 zlotys per month before tax, so unless broadband is high on your list of priorities it's hard to justify it out of your budget.

Poland is also one of the most populous Eastern Europe countries so it's hardly surprising that they were the first to break the 1,000,000 lines target.

There is a simple reason why DSL is winning...

....In the quest for porn, dial-up just doesn't cut it ;)

Error in the summary

According to the article, USA, China, UK, Japan and France lead the world in broadband lines added in 2005 Q1. For overall number of broadband lines, the leaders are USA, China, Japan, South Korea, and France in order.

as % of users?

The chart comparing U.S. to China is impressive as is, but I'd be curious to see one showing broadband as a % of population than just # of households.

zombies

And how many of those are zombies?

Bad Security

And, at last count, maybe 10% of those broadband connections have a router/firewall in front of them, and probably about 40% or more are connected to zombied Windows boxen that are spamming and otherwise causing havoc. This is why Cable/DSL companies suck, they should charge an extra 2 dollars a month for the first year, and give every customer a router (and install it for them).

Sorry! Not News!

Let's break it down. 164,000,000 is the key number here. Now as we all know, a number must be Fully Rounded to make news. At first glance 000,000 seems to qualify the number. However we have all seen the last six digits of the number of broadband subscribers roll over 163 times before so it is not important, therefore we must examine the MSD's of the attempt to interest us. We have 164. Is this round, or at least a prime number? No. Since God speaks to us only in round numbers of His majesty we must therefore conclude that the news day was slow.

And Thank God for that!

As one that got connectes to BBS(es) at 2400 baud, I can't tell you how much I cherish my broadband connection. Having spent $110 a month for ISDN because it was better than 56k, paying $50 a month for cable is a pittance for the return it gives.

Questions

1) What constitutes broadband? Here in NZ, 256k up / 128k down is "broadband"..

2) How common is data capping? 10Gb is a common limit here, after which the connection is limited to 64kbps.

What?

I thought South Korea was completely wired with GB connections.

you'd think there'd be some sort of award for having government support in the quest

Damn!

Forgive me if I seem rude, but we've got to get those fuckers signed up on Empornium.

And to stay ontopic, I think 20-30 years from now, we'll be the ones telling our kids, "why when I was your age, we had 4 computers in the whole school with internet access. not only that but it was at 24K shared, and we had to congure WinSock on our own with nothing more than a command line. and if we wanted to play doom it took a week of preparation, and 2 hours of cable switching to get it to work. and it took 45 seconds to download just one image"

We need to focus on internet penetration

not broadband penetration. Broadband technology may matter to us nerds, but half the population of the UK [bbc.co.uk] doesn't use the net. I imagine many other countries are the same. These people need to get on the net by any means necessary, so a nice cheap dialup connection is a very good idea, even if it is slow. Once they get used to the idea, then perhaps they'll move up to broadband.

It's important for society in the long run to encourage technological laggards to get connected. Increasing the speed of already connected users is great, but is less significant.

In Poland

In solviet bloc Poland, broadband hooks up you!

Satisfied users?

I wonder how many of the subscribers are satisfied?

I'm hitchiking on my neighbor's wireless at the moment, because Comcast has let me down yet again. Last Friday they disconnected me accidentally, and can't fix it until Monday (and I live in Silicon Valley, not somewhere hard to reach). From my point of view, they're another monopolistic phone type company with abyssmal customer service. Sure, I can get a DSL line, but it's under 1Mbps at my location. There are no other broadband providers available to me.

At what point will our society view internet access as necessary and ubiquitous as the generic phone line?

Good ol' Poland

Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club.

We almost forgot about them.

The Internets

Why US Broadband Access Lags Other Countries [able2know.com]

Broadband?

I wonder how many of those lines are actual broadband (connection speed at or above 1.5 Mbps). I know lots of ISP's marketing 64, 128 and 256 Kbps lines as broadband...

Wow that's a big number and...

I for one welcome our Broadband, highspeed Internet overlords.

As a part-time dialup user, I'd like to remind Comcast, Shaw, and Rogers that I can be useful in rounding up other 56Kpbs users to toil in their underground technical support call centers.

Long Live BitTorrent!

Per Capita is a better mark

The USA is only at 12.5% per capita according to the stats. Canada sits at over 18%.

160/164 are in US/Europe wasting bandwidth

Not too many in Asia, though. One of my Indian friend told me that he got 'broadband'. I was surprised to see that his speed was 128kbps.

Not the number sold

Many people shop around, which accounts for the multiple 'purchases'. Theres a big difference between advertised and actual throughput, which is the first reason people continue to shop around. The number is higher in countries with broadband competition where people have more to 'test'.

Unfortunately the installed technologies for all these residential broadband connections have a limit... 4mb/800kbps for DSL and 8mb/1mb for cable. To switch to faster speeds in some newer technologies, you'd have to change the DSLAMS, all modems and reevaluate the cable and pots lines everywhere. It seems like 56k dialup, we have once again saturated our technological bandwidth.

To provide more spectrum of offerings, Bell canada actually downsamples connections to rediculously low speeds and others are following suite. Apparently todays broadband on average is much slower than the broadband 3 years ago here. This may be the first time average internet speeds have dipped across the years... and its because the technology isnt scalable beyond its current speed.

Ideally the govt will just put fibre to the door everywhere, allow ISPs to connect to the fibre mesh and let free economy take its course. Voters will be smart enough to make that happen in a few years.

How fast is your connection ?

I was wondering how fast is your connection in your country ?

Here in France, the average would be a 2 MBits/s, I think (with up to 20 MBits for about 1 million people)

And you ?

Second largest

China is the second largest in the number of users on Broadband. Wonder what all these users do online with so many of their activities censored/monitored (blogs, email, sites).

Am I wrong to infer that the attempts of the Chinese government to censor internet access are not really effective. Either that or the chinese have gotten used to the restrictions and are satisfied with playing within the limits.

I would have taken the latter for granted except that my web server logs told a completely different story.

Not in England!

Having just got back from the States and being used to being able to get 4M/384k DSL or cable *ANYWHERE* it's a little annoying that I am offered a wonderful 8M/400k ADSL by some companies, and then told that the line cannot sustain 2M/256k so they can't help me, but I can get 512K/128k from BT for the same price (please note this is not in the middle of a field somewhere, this is a mile from a big city).

And even the three people in London who do qualify for the 8meg service only get about 3meg in reality due to crappy copper [overhead] wires.

Plus they're still knocking out the stupid USB "frog" modems that use about 80% CPU (so the first thing you have to do is go buy a router and ditch the frog).

And what about bandwidth limiting - yes a lot of plans offer you 8meg of bandwidth a month - sorry, but that would be used up by checking your Email! Can we now charge spammers for using up our bandwidth with their remotely hosted images?

So after being away for 4 years, Britain is still in the same place as far as broadband goes, and that's the Dark Ages!

Correction

Make that 164,000,001.

Canada last...

But considering the land mass vs. population, it's not a wonder it's so... perhaps it's my bias due to whom I hang with, but most of my friends have at least a DSL connection, if not cable. I can think of a few (in my view) weirdos I know that are not on at least some type of high-speed (my mom comes to mind, but hell, she's 63...) but most of those I know are on a speedy link to the 'net. Dunno... perhaps on a per capita basis, Canada would score better...

Eastern vs. Central Europe

Poland was the first Eastern European country to join the 'million broadband lines' club.

Just so you know, because some Pole might slap you in the face otherwise:

Poland isn't and never was a part of "Eastern Europe". "Eastern Europe" is synonym for Byzantium/Orthodox Church (among other things) while Poland was always Roman Catholic country.

Poland for a short period of time was a part of the "Eastern Block", but it was always located in "Central Europe", just like Austria or Czech Republic.

Robert

In other news...

I was the 164 millionth.

here comes a rant

ADSL/broadband,eh?
1. Does this mean more horrid websites that assume that everyone likes/wants flash? How do they get away with it? They just assume I wanna see their "groovy" flashy cr** all of the time.
2. I'd have thought that Koree-ya would be #1 on that chart.
3. Was this chart compiled by some group of Yanks/Brits/Frogs? Why is the UK on this list? There's a huge advertising campaign by a company screaming 8meg/seg. "sorry can't do that, too much line noise".

Re:So uh....

Probably they didn't count people using internet cafes.

Re:Per capita

I would be surprised if countries like South Korea and Sweden wouldn't be ranked among the top nations.

They are [digital-lifestyles.info]:

1. South Korea
2. The Netherlands
3. Denmark
4. Hong Kong
5. Canada
6. Switzerland
7. Israel
8. Taiwan
9. Norway
10. Sweden

The US of A is nowhere to be seen.