There will be 618.7 million subscribers to fixed broadband worldwide...
There will be 618.7 million subscribers to fixed broadband worldwide by the end of 2012, an increase of 7.3 percent from 2011, ABI Research said Friday. More than one-third of the world’s households will have a fixed broadband connection by…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
that time, according to ABI. While growth occurred in all fixed broadband platforms, growth slowed to 1.5 percent from Q1. The slowdown indicates DSL subscribers are looking at fiber and other alternative platforms, ABI Research said. “Development of next generation broadband networks is creating opportunities to upgrade customers to fiber optic,” ABI Research Vice President Jake Saunders said in a news release (http://xrl.us/bnsr4y). Fiber broadband’s market share is expected to increase to 13.2 percent by the end of 2012 -- from 12 percent in 2011 -- while DSL’s market share will decline nearly 1 percentage point from 64 percent in 2011, he said. The increased penetration of connected devices, apps and services over broadband has continued to help drive adoption of high-speed broadband, ABI Research said. At the end of Q2, more than 44 percent of subscribers were using a service with speeds of 10 Mbps and up, ABI Research analyst Khin Sandi Lynn said in the release. Operators are finding it challenging to know how much to invest in fixed broadband networks and services, Infonetics Research analyst Jeff Heynen said in a separate analyst note (http://xrl.us/bnsr4q). “On one hand, fixed broadband is among the most profitable services a provider can offer,” he said. “On the other hand, the investment required to roll out or upgrade mobile networks is eating into their available capital.” Infonetics’ latest broadband access survey shows the transition to next-generation fixed access technologies like 10G EPON and XGPON1 will take longer than the industry hoped, Heynen said. “The fundamental drivers are there, but they aren’t pressing enough to force a wholesale shift in deployment timelines, and they don’t outweigh the higher costs of next-gen equipment,” he said.