Broadband’s quarterly growth rate in Q2 2006 has been the lowest ever, just 7.1% worldwide, a large drop from the 8.5% at the end of 2005, according to a new report from Point Topic.
Amongst all regions, only South-East Asia and Asia-Pacific reported an increase in growth rate over the quarter. Despite the slight increase from 4.4% to 4.5% in Q2, Asia-Pacific was still the region with the lowest growth rate, mainly due to the saturation in the broadband market.
North America and Western Europe also suffered from the effect of saturation, only managing to achieve 4.8% and 5.6% quarterly growth respectively.
Point Topic says that as a common trend, the broadband market often shows a decline during the first half of the year, which leaves them expecting more substantial growth in the third and fourth quarters.
The report shows that the growth in DSL has slowed down gradually since Q3 2005, with this being more apparent in Asian-Pacific countries such as South Korea and Japan where a significant number of subscribers have migrated from DSL to FTTx.
Cable modem is also doing well, however, that too has reported a decline in growth during Q2.
In terms of the total number of broadband lines added in the second quarter, China once again added significantly more lines than the USA, with a net addition of 5.1 million lines, moving the country total up to 46 million lines in total.
These 46 million lines account for almost 19% of the world’s broadband total and Point Topic says that this high growth rate and the large number of potential subscribers mean that China will soon become the country with the largest broadband subscriber base in the world.
At the start of September, Ovum released a forecast which said that in less than a year China will overtake the US to become the world’s biggest broadband market and will go on to reach 139 million broadband subscribers by 2010 (see China’s Broadband Market Will Reach 139 Million Subscribers By 2010).
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