Annual report on industry and marketing developments in broadband including: cable modems, ADSL, VDSL, ADSL2, ADSL2+, VoBB, Broadband TV (IPTV).

Report also contains:

Market and industry analyses, trends and developments
Facts, figures and statistics
Services and content Developments
Broadbanding local and regional communities
Infrastructure trends
Regional overviews: USA, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East, Australia, New Zealand

Executive Summary

Global Broadband Market - boom driven by DSL

Since its introduction, broadband has been growing at an astounding rate, propelled by the demand for the improved services that it facilitates. The early high growth in a small number of countries such as South Korea has now spread to most other countries, with the early developers starting to show signs of saturation. Although cable still predominates in North America, DSL is much stronger in the rest of the world, and is catching up against cable in the USA. Other technologies such as satellite are minor players.

By 2005, over one billion telephone lines are providing a robust, core global infrastructure capable of delivering Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) broadband to homes, offices, schools and governments using DSL. With that utility already in place to deliver the real economic and lifestyle benefits of broadband to the world’s populations, DSL is the most effective and economical route to global broadband deployment. Most DSL-enabled phone lines are residential, but many are already being used for business purposes by people working at home outside normal office hours, telecommuting or keeping in touch with colleagues working in other time zones.

Using their existing networks, in countries where they compete, cable TV operators established an early lead in high speed data transfer with their cable modems. These companies have invested heavily to upgrade their cables to be able to handle the additional broadband market, and will defend that investment vigorously. By 2004 it had passed cable on a global basis. In the USA however, cable companies are moving towards the concept of ‘Triple Play’, providing access, basic telephone services and content. Since early 2005 they are offering VoIP service in direct competition to the voice services offered by the telcos.

With the arrival of the Internet, content became more prominent again and video based applications were revived in order to deliver them over the Internet. The file-sharing features of the Internet created success of Napster. Similar peer-to-peer file sharing initiatives shows that multi-media file sharing remains a key application. More specifically, multi-media file sharing can be seen as a subset of Webcasting, of which streaming data/audio/video and Video-on-Demand (VoD) are other examples. Nextgen DSL based broadband networks based on IP are now rapidly moving into triple play business models, delivering voice, data and video services; DSL TV (Broadband TV or IPTV as it is also called) is one of the new emerging disruptive technologies. Developments in France, Italy, Singapore, Korea and Japan are taking place at mind-boggling speeds.

The technological resilience of the copper-based network in the wake of broadband has been an early setback for fibre-to-the-home (FttH) deployment. It is most unlikely that countries with subdued infrastructure-based competition will undertake significant large-scale commercial roll-outs in the near future. The USA will be a notable exception here. Most initial FttH roll-outs are now concentrating on their DSL extensions. Green field developments and niche markets will be the way forward. Other opportunities exist for developers, cities and states/provinces, who see FttH as an important infrastructure development and, as such, are prepared to take the lead in FttH roll-outs. Competition in Asia is bucking the trend, with large-scale commercial rollouts well and truly underway.