InStat: Speed drove broadband subscriber growth to 763 million in 2010

In 2010, the ongoing need for higher speeds at the home to power up bandwidth-intensive applications (online video, IP telephony and music downloads) drove up broadband subscriber growth to 763 million in 2010.

According to In-Stat's new report, World Connecting at Broadband Speeds, More Mobile in 2010, worldwide broadband subscribers grew 25 percent between 2007 through 2009.

Vahid Dejwakh, Industry Analyst, said that the rate of growth will "slowly decrease to 10 percent by 2014 as the market matures," while the "Asia/Pacific region will continue to see very high growth rates, along with Latin America and the Middle East/Africa regions."

Each of the major broadband regions will be driven by different factors of growth. In the U.S., a big contributor of the 179 million broadband growth in 2010 was due to cable modem services.

DSL and Fiber to the Home (FTTH) also continued to rise in 2010. Total worldwide DSL subscribers will reach 371 million at year-end 2010, fueled primarily by strong demand for DSL service in the Asia/Pacific region. Asia-Pacific also drove about 76 percent of the world's FTTH subscribers in 2010 as well. In addition to wireline broadband, wireless-based 3G and oncoming 4G services are continually becoming a factor in overall worldwide broadband growth.

In-Stat's forecasts are slightly higher than a previous report written by Analysys Mason that focused only on wireline broadband services.  

For more:
- see the release

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