Asia crosses 260 mn broadband connections

According to Broadband Forum, the global broadband subscribers has soared to over 600 million in the first quarter of 2012 and Asia continues to be the highest overall region with 262 million subscribers.

The region has added 8.5 million subscribers at a growth rate of 3.4 percent in the quarter and 15.2 percent in the year. The five Asian countries in the top 20, together serve 239 million broadband subscribers —more than one-third of the global total.

The highest annual growth rates are Russia (27.43 percent) and Ukraine (26.82 percent), with China, India and Brazil also posting double-digit annual increases. As per the report there lot of momentum on broadband and in less than 18 months there has been an addition of 100 million new lines.

Globally, the growth in broadband during Q1 of 2012 was estimated at 16 million lines, up from just over 14 million in the last quarter of 2011. This represents a quarterly rise of 2.7 percent and an annual increase of 11.48 percent.

“DSL is the most popular access technology on a global basis: although its market share has dropped by 0.5% in the quarter, there is a long way to go before the copper-based access technology is overtaken,” said Oliver Johnson, CEO of Point Topic.

For fiber, 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 in terms of technology market share he added.

"This is another significant milestone in an exciting arena that shows no sign of slowing down,” commented Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.

It is just 18 months since we celebrated the 500 million subscriber watershed and even less time since IPTV subscribers reached 50 million - yet in both cases growth is still accelerating he added.

IPTV, the most demanding application for high speed broadband, now has 65.6 million subscribers, up 3.8 million in the quarter.

The Asian market is advancing the fastest with the strong leader- China added over three times as many IPTV subscribers in the quarter as any other country. This gap is likely to increase even further though both France and the US are reporting strong numbers and accelerated growth in the report period.