Worldwide broadband subscribers rise to 410.9 million

Despite diminished budgets and increasingly thrifty expenditure, the figures for worldwide broadband subscribers still rose 3.47 per cent between the third and fourth quarter of 2008. In comparison to figures collected for the period between the second and third quarter, though, this signals a slight dip in take-up.

Collecting the data, research firm Point Topic found the number of broadband subscribers to be a figure of around 410.9 million. In terms of continental penetration these figures look like this:

Western Europe - 25.73% (Q4)
North America - 21.53% (Q4)
South and East Asia - 22.76% (Q4)
Asia-Pacific - 15.40% (Q4)
Latin America - 6.33% (Q4)
Eastern Europe - 5.34% (Q4)
Middle East and Africa - 2.91% (Q4)

Looking at individual countries, China and the USA are currently leading the way with broadband subscribers exceeding 70 million - significantly more than Japan, found to be in third place at just under 30 million. Since the last survey, Brazil has managed to overtake Canada jumping into 9th place.

Point Topic’s research delved even deeper as it looked into the type of broadband users across the world are choosing to use.

Fixed line DSL (ADSL, SDSL) broadband is currently the most popular option with a dominating take up of 64.79 whilst cable attracts 20.50 per cent. Super-fast broadband still has to make its mark on the global broadband subscriber base with only a small percentage of users (12.73 per cent), whilst other forms of broadband connectivity (wireless, satellite etc) were found to only make up 2.35 per cent of the total figure.