It seems the UK is the top of one broadband league. If you rank European countries based on the number of broadband subscribers, the UK comes out top with 9.8 million lines, France has 9.7 million and Germany is in third place with 8.4 million (source: Guardian Online).
This is the first time that the UK has held the top position on the number of subscribers, though outside of Europe other countries like South Korea do have more users. The Asia-Pacific region has around 41% of all broadband lines, and the Americas 28%. At the end of the third quarter of 2005, there was a total of 190.3 million broadband lines around the world, with 37.9 million of them being added during 2005. These figures along with other statistics on broadband around the world can be found at Point-Topic.com.
During 2005, BT appeared to make a seemingly generous offer by doubling the speeds of its 1Mbps (megabit per second) service for no extra cost. This was overshadowed as rivals started to offer standard speeds of 4Mbps and 8Mbps but what it did do for BT was lay the foundations for it’s next-generation consumer offering. This offering, launched on the 8th of December comprises two elements: ADSL broadband and the "BT Hub", a router that provides a wireless network in the home. The services that BT can deliver over this infrastructure fall into three categories:
- Communications. PC-based and phone-based VoIP services, with advanced applications such as network-based address books, unified messaging, video calling and high-definition voice calling
- Entertainment. Broadcast TV including PVR features, 'catch-up TV', archive TV, movies on demand, music on demand and interactive gaming.
- "Life management". ID protection, Internet protection and parental controls, home surveillance, and online content backup and management.
The entertainment services will include BBC Worldwide, Paramount Pictures and Warner Music. It has also partnered with Freeview, however the Office of Fair Trading announced on 30th December 2005, that it was clearing the purchase of EasyNet by BSkyB for £211 million which would probably deprive BT of the ability to offer popular pay channels such as Sky One and Sky Sports. Without these, a large fraction of the potential pay-TV customer base will be unlikely to consider BT as its provider.
BT talks about a nationwide offering, but this turns out to be predicated on the assumption that 2Mbit/s of DSL access is enough. You can deliver a broadcast-quality video stream over 2 Mbps but you can't deliver much else. If someone is accessing the Internet at the same time they're likely to find the experience falling well short of what one expects from broadband. The integrated bundle of home entertainment and communications services is going to need a lot more access bandwidth than 2 Mbps if it is to live up to expectations.
Towards the end of the 2005, the next-generation of broadband, so-called ADSL2+, was on everyone's lips - this time with a promise of even greater speeds up to 24Mbps. BT, Wannadoo and Bulldog (C+W) are currently testing the service but UK Online pipped them to the post, becoming the first to offer it nationwide.
UK Online was able to get there first thanks to another technology which had matured during the year - so-called local loop unbundling. This offers rivals to BT the chance to put their own equipment in phone exchanges, and bring new services to market without having to wait for the nod from BT. It has played a vital role during the course of the year in ensuring services get faster and faster and will continue to be key to developments in 2006. It does bring its own problems though, as providers tend to chose the more densely populated areas of towns and cities, which in turn are more profitable, to roll out services.
There is controversy over the true achievable speed of ADSL2+ with researchers saying that many people will not get anywhere near 24Mbps. Broadband market analysts Point Topic warned that only 5% of the population would receive as much as 18Mbps. The research found that to achieve the full 24Mbps, people would have to live within 300 metres of their telephone exchange. However the consensus is that if you live two kilometres or closer to your telephone exchange you should be able to get higher speeds than 8Mbps. Services should become available this year with a monthly charge from about £30 per month but unless you have a compatible adsl router, you'll need to replace it for one that supports ADSL2+.
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