Australian broadband users surged 22 percent in FY08 to 4.3m

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 18 December 2008 10:03

IT Industry - Strategy

An additional 800,000 Australian households signed up for broadband access services in the year to 30 June 2008 taking the number of broadband households to 4.3 million according to the latest figures the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The figure represents an increase of 22 percent on June 2007, but still left 48 percent of households without broadband. However the ABS stats show that almost all Internet connected households are now on broadband: the total number with Internet access was 5.5 million. Three quarters of all households (6.2m) had access to a computer.

The ACT had the highest proportion of BROADBAND connections, at 68 percent of households while Tasmania (39 percent) and South Australia (42 percent) were the lowest. Other states ranged from 51 to 55 percent.

Households with an income of $120,000 had substantially higher rates of access (81 percent) than households incomes of less than $40,000 (38 percent) and households with children under 15 had higher broadband access (67 percent) compared to households without (46 percent).

The percentage of broadband households on ADSL remained fairy constant at 69 percent, but there was a three percentage points decrease in cable connections, offset by a three percentage points increase in other technologies, According to the ABS, this was largely driven by the take up of wireless and satellite broadband technologies.

At 30 June 2008 satellite accounted for three percent of all broadband connections. The ABS noted: "there continues to be a significant lack of awareness by respondents of the type of Broadband technologies being used (12 percent)."

The ABS' results were extrapolated from a Multi-Purpose Household Survey with an initial sample of approximately 18,480 private dwelling households from which the ABS obtained about 14,000 complete responses.