In a new report, Point Topic estimates that spending from businesses on broadband value added services (BVAS) helped push the worldwide broadband market through the $50 billion barrier early this year.
Business spending on BVAS now generates $2.3 billion a year, according to the report and although this is a significant new income, it still falls below spending on basic broadband which generated $32 billion from individual consumers and $13 billion from businesses at the beginning of 2004.
The value added applications analysed by Point Topic included voice-over-internet-protocol, video conferencing and remote backup of computer data. The study revealed that penetration is still under 1% of business broadband lines for most of these services, so there is still enormous growth potential for these applications.