While the leading broadband countries, especially China have shown improvements in broadband lines shipped, recovering well from the second quarter, the low penetrated ‘second wave’ countries are the only places where broadband growth is still substantial in percentage terms. This is the conclusion of a report released this week by Point Topic, the UK broadband counting service which has just issued its quarterly numbers update.
Point Topic says that the top 10 broadband countries in the world have added just 9.3 million broadband lines in Q3 up 2.95% while the rest of the world grew faster at 3.7% and countries like Indonesia had growth of over 20%, while Egypt and the Philippines were above 10% growth.
‘Top 10 growth has picked up since the second quarter of 2009, which could represent the low point for world broadband adds. China is looking stronger, the US is gradually building again and a generally healthier picture is emerging,’ says Oliver Johnson, CEO at Point Topic.
But Point Topic warns that the top 10 countries have their stragglers, with
Japan and South Korea running out of homes to take Broadband to, where most of the activity is replacing DSL with new broadband technologies, and it expects Canada to soon fall out of the top ten being overtaken by Russia and possibly Spain as well.
Growth in Russia is being led by DSL subscriptions and that has been the case in the other top performers worldwide.
‘DSL is the cheapest broadband option in every market around the world in monthly subscription and usually deployment terms. That’s significant for growth in countries where average incomes won’t stretch to super fast access,’ says Johnson.
In the third quarter of 2009 DSL was responsible for almost 70% of the net broadband adds in the world and took market share from the other two major technologies, cable and fiber.
None of the large, rapidly growing, countries has a broadband population penetration over 10% and DSL is increasing its dominance in all of them. The second wave of broadband growth is going to really kick in during 2010 and it’s going to be driven by low cost access, Point Topic said.