ABS reports big surge in high speed broadband & downloads. - UPDATE

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 18:41

IT Industry - Deals

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' latest Internet Activity Survey shows a 43 percent increase in the number of broadband services with bandwidth higher than 1.5Mbps since September, a 21 percent increase in download volumes and a 16 percent decline in dial up numbers.

At the end of March, according to the ABS, there were 6.43 million active Internet subscribers in Australia, comprised of 761,000 business and government subscribers and 5.67 million household subscribers. The number of non dial-up subscribers was 4.34 million, represented 67 percent of the total, compared with 2.09 million dial-up subscribers. Non dial-up subscribers increased by 16 percent between September 2006 and March 2007, while dial-up dropped by 16 percent.

DSL continued to be the dominant access technology used for non dial-up subscribers accounting for 3.36 million or almost 78 percent of total non dial-up subscribers. Connections with download speeds of 1.5Mbps or greater increased by 43 percent in March 2007 to 1.56 million, compared to 1.09 million subscribers at the end of September 2006.

During the quarter a total of 42,000 terabytes of data were downloaded, a 21 percent increase on the September quarter figure of 34,700  terabytes.
The ABS gathers data only from the 32 ISPs with over 10,000 active subscribers and notes that growth from September 2006 to March 2007 could be due to the movement of subscribers from smaller ISPs (or presumably to small ISPs being acquired by large ISPs).