Despite one in every two Australian homes having a fixed broadband connection, we barely make it into the Top 20 list of countries with the highest penetration of home broadband.
IT research firm Gartner has crunched the numbers on worldwide home broadband connections and Australia has
just scraped into the Top 20 list.
The firm reports that at the end of 2008, some 55% of Australian households had a fixed broadband connection. Wireless broadband services such as 3G HSDPA are not included in the tally, but their relatively small uptake wouldn’t give us a seat at the cool kids’ table.
Still, knowing that every second Aussie home has a fast Internet connection is not to be sneezed at. And Gartner predicts that by two-thirds of all homes will join the broadband brigade by 2013 with an estimated 69% penetration.
On the worldwide scale Australia is one of approximately 21 countries with broadband connections in at least 50 percent of homes – 382 million households, if you want to do a door-by-door count – as at the end of 2008.
That number is lesser for the world as a whole, being dragged down by countries such as Indonesia which has home broadband penetration at less than 1%. Even so, Gartner predicts one in five homes around the globe will have fixed broadband by the end of this year.
(Source: Gartner, September 2009)
The most connected countries are South Korea, which has hot-wired 86% of its homes; the Netherlands (80%), Denmark (75%), Hong Kong (72%) and Canada (69%) and Switzerland (67%).
Gartner’s forecast sees South Korea’s home broadband connections zooming to 93% by 2013, but the real areas of growth will be the ‘emerging markets’.
The BRIC bloc of Brazil, Russia, India and China will account for almost half of the total global increase in connections by 2013, for example, with China alone adding an estimated 62 million homes to the overall tally.