December 19, 2006

According to the latest report from Point Topic's quarterly World Broadband Stats, new numbers revealed today that eastern Europe saw the highest broadband growth in the third quarter of this year. Overall, Eastern Europe saw a remarkable 12.7 percent growth rate in the third quarter of 2006.

This increases the region's market share from 2.6 to 3.5 percent for all of 2006. In second place in the research company's rankings was the Middle East and Africa region, with quarterly growth of 11.9 percent this year.

"With an unsaturated market for the most part, MEA is one of the fastest growing regions," said Point Topic analyst Vince Chook. "The area had annual growth of 67.1 percent between Q3 2005 and Q3 2006."

Other regions, such as South America, also performed well in the quarter. Western Europe and South-East Asia were the only two regions to report an actual drop in growth rate in the period.

As the Point Topic figures show, the worldwide total of broadband lines reached 263.8 million at the end of Sep. 2006, with a total of 16.9 million lines added over the quarter.

The world's DSL total reached 173 million, due to 10 million lines being added over the quarter.

Among the three access technologies, DSL is still dominating the broadband market with a total market share of 65.6 per cent.

For Fibre to the Exchange (FTTx), the market continues to grow at a rate of 12.6 per cent, almost twice as fast as in cable modem, reaching 27 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2006.

In regions such as Asia Pacific and North America, the quarterly growth in FTTx is well over 20 per cent and the total number of FTTx subscribers in the Asia Pacific region outpaced cable modem by 320,000.

Source: Vnunet