Backward Ireland ranks 47th in the DSL classroom

zz03

Quelle surprise!

"Ireland lags in DSL despite high growth
Friday, September 12 2003
by Matthew Clark (enn.ie) in association with About Us

Ireland ranks third globally for growth in DSL subscriptions, but the Republic has a long way to go to catch up with its peers in Western Europe.

The DSL Forum, an industry group that promotes the high-speed Internet technology known as DSL, said in its half-year update that Ireland had the third-fastest growth rate for DSL subscriptions worldwide, at 218 percent. Growth was fastest in Saudi Arabia, at 500 percent, while Malaysia ranked second with 257 percent growth.

However, the growth percentage is somewhat deceptive since Ireland's DSL penetration is relatively low. The Forum calculates that about 7,200 new subscribers took up the service in the first half of 2003, compared to countries like Poland and Israel, which added 26,500 and 175,000 subscribers respectively during the six-month period, but had much lower growth percentages.

Other figures also show Ireland's relative backwardness when it comes to DSL, with the Republic ranking 50th globally for total number of DSL subscribers out of the 54 countries that have commercial DSL services. The Republic is 47th out of 54 in terms of DSL lines per 100 phone lines, with slightly over 0.5 percent of Ireland's phone lines DSL-enabled. China, Mexico, Malaysia, Israel and Singapore all have more DSL lines per 100 phone lines than Ireland, the survey by UK firm Point Topic said.

Still, on a global basis, DSL has shown good growth, the Forum said at the Broadband World Forum in London earlier this week. Worldwide, there are now about 46.7 million DSL subscribers after 10.7 million were added during the January to June 2003 period.

Growth of the technology has not been equal, however. According to the Forum, seven of the 54 countries that now have commercial broadband DSL services accounted for almost 75 percent of the world's subscriber growth. The top growth countries were Japan, China and the US, which added 2.6 million, 1.9 million and 1.2 million subscribers respectively. Thanks to the additions, Japan remained the world leader for DSL with 8.3 million subscribers, while China now has 4.1 million and the US has 7.6 million.

Importantly, the UK, France, Germany and Italy all gained over 500,000 subscribers during the six months and, combined, they account for about 7.4 million of the world's DSL subscriptions. Of the four, Germany is the biggest market by far, with nearly 4 million subscribers, while the UK has just over 1 million but was the fastest-growing of the group.

"Western Europe is no longer playing catch-up in the broadband race. Over half of the countries showing greatest subscriber growth and half of the top 20 for DSL are in the region," said Michael Brusca, vice president of strategy for the DSL Forum in a statement e-mailed to ElectricNews.Net. He also described Ireland's growth as "phenomenal."

The DSL Forum's target for broadband DSL is 20 percent of all phone lines, or 200 million subscribers by the end of 2005. The organisation said that South Korea remains the only country in the world to have achieved mass-market status, with 29.7 percent of its phone lines delivering DSL services. "


http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9374926.html

Urban Weigl

***** third world countries always stopping us from being number one! :mad:

Paddy20

Dear Bertie,

Please empower Comreg with the legal clout required to resolve Irelands DSL "Joke status" in world and EU statistics?..

Yours sincerely, being as polite as I can possibly be!.

P.;)

unkel

thx zz03 for posting that

MDR

Move this thread to 'Market Policy Issues' please.

Qadhafi

im sure if eircom tries hard enough we can push past Peru

Well put things in perspective. If Eircom gets the 100,000 broadband customers its pushing for, that will put us at something like 10% (above Taiwan)in terms of penetration per 100 people. Thats respectable, However Eircom and BT are going to have to bring the price of a 512k connection to something realistic like €30 a month. €50 is still way to expensive!!

po0k

And get rid of interleaving and caps at around 30gigs download, upload uncapped, with maybe 50c per gig download after that, contention of 24:1, bigger backhauls, God knows there's enough fibre criss-crossing the country (well, that which wasn't sold to Germany)