Broadband growth

[mulligan]

Iceland comes first in broadband

Iceland is most web-savvy country, with a study showing it has the highest concentration of broadband users.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that broadband was also widespread in South Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark.


But the US still has the most broadband users, with more than 49 million.
Overall broadband subscriptions in OECD countries jumped from 136 million to 158 million in the six months to December 2005.
The OECD figures revealing Iceland topping the list of broadband users were a surprise as South Korea is regularly touted as being the most wired nation on Earth following government drives to get people using fast net connections.


Fibre and cable
According to the economic group, Iceland has 78,017 broadband subscribers and South Korea 12,190,711.


The leading countries in broadband use per capita all had more than 25% of their net users subscribing to such a service. Iceland led the field on 26.7%.


By comparison, the UK was ranked 12th with 15.9%, just behind the US with 16.8%.
The study also found the rate of people taking up broadband remained at an average of 15%.
Japan followed the US in the largest number of broadband users, with 22.5 million. It also leads in fibre-to-the-premises usage, with 4.6 million fibre subscribers by the end of 2005.



The number of fibre subscribers in Japan now outnumbers the total of broadband users in 21 of the 30 OECD countries.


In Korea, fibre-based broadband connections grew 52.4% during the second half of 2005. However, despite the growth in the number of users connecting via fibre, the statistics reveal that DSL remains the leading broadband technology in 28 OECD countries.
In the US and Canada, cable subscribers outnumber those that use DSL.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4903776.stm

[Edwin]

There are so many conflicting figures around, it's hard to tell what's "true" (probably somewhere in the middle).

For example, according to the following links, 55% of the UK population use the internet, and of that, 64.2% are doing so on broadband. That gives a broadband per capita figure of 35.3% which is more than twice the rate stated in the BBC article.
http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/...le.php/3588656
http://www.clickz.com/img/Global_Int...mber_2005.html

This survey had broadband per capita penetration in Japan at 36.2% (32.24 million people) as far back as June 2005, even though the OECD study quoted by BBC has it at just 17.5%
http://www.impressholdings.com/relea...20050607_d.pdf

Basically, take EVERY survey with a huge pinch of salt! Nobody seems to know for sure, and every survey seems to have a different methodology.

[thefabfive]

Get ready for Icelandic IDN landrush!

I see DCG already got his.

[touchring]

Talking about iceland, the best iceland domain - capital of iceland was caught by jobcollect in Feb i think.