Australian consumers' use of 24 Mbps, higher broadband speeds tops 2M mark

Australian consumers continue to adopt higher speed broadband services, including speeds higher than 24 Mbps, says a new Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) study.

As of the end of last year, there were more than 2 million Australian Internet subscribers accessing download speeds of 24 Mbps or greater. ABS said this was an additional 443,000 subscribers accessing the Internet over 2012.

The total volume of data downloaded (excluding mobile handsets) reached 861,000 terabytes (TB) for the three months to the end of December 2013, up a third compared to the volume downloaded in the June 2013 quarter.

While wireless continues to become a bigger broadband service factor, Lesley Martin, ABS' assistant director of Innovation and Technology, said it continues to see growth in the number of subscribers using traditional wireline-based technologies such as cable modem, DSL and fiber to the home (FTTH) connections where available to access the Internet.  

"Of this total, fixed-line broadband was used for 96 percent of downloads, which confirms recent trends that subscribers are using fixed-line internet connections to download the majority of their data," Martin said in a release.

For more:
- see the release

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