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Broadband Access
IPTV subscribers up 179 percent
DSL Forum excited by growth last year
by Iain Morris
Millions of broadband users across the world are finding IPTV
hard to resist, with customer numbers rising from 2,950,000
to 8,229,000 in the 12 months leading to June 2007.
That is the finding of the DSL Forum, a lobby group for DSL
broadband technology, based on new research commissioned
from consultancy Point Topic.
Most of the growth came from Europe, where the number of
IPTV customers soared to 4,984,000 from 1,505,000 a year
earlier.
In the Americas, 660,000 broadband customers signed up to
IPTV services, giving the region a total of 1,069,000 users,
while the Asia Pacific added 1,189,000 customers to give it
2,176,000 subscribers.
“We’re very excited about these figures,” says Laurie
Gonzalez, marketing director for the DSL Forum. “Even a year
ago people were asking whether IPTV would be a compelling
application. Today more than eight million customers are
using it in every region of the world. It’s gone far beyond
testing to real rollout.”
DSL “more than enough”
Although impressive, growth has come from a low base and
still leaves IPTV trailing other pay-TV platforms. BSkyB, a
satellite operator, has around eight million pay-TV customers
in the UK alone.
Nor is it clear how many IPTV customers are using DSL
technology, which has been criticized by some operators as
too slow for such bandwidth-hungry services. IPTV pioneers
like France Telecom and Hong Kong’s PCCW — which together
account for around 1.5 million users — have built expensive
fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks to support their IPTV
offers.
DSL Forum COO Robin Mersh rejects the attack. “Everyone
says we need more bandwidth but the industry is getting
better at using what’s out there to provide services,” he
says. “I think 24Mbps is more than enough.”
ADSL2+ technology, an advanced version of DSL, is
theoretically capable of providing 24Mbps, although actual
speeds can depend on the distance between a customer’s
home and the local telephone exchange.
In the UK, incumbent operator BT is rolling out ADSL2+ to
support its BT Vision IPTV service, although most channels
are currently delivered using digital broadcast technology. The
service had attracted around 20,000 subscribers by June 2007.
Mersh is also encouraged by the performance of operators
using fiber in combination with DSL to deliver IPTV. In the U.S.,
AT&T has attracted more than 100,000 customers to its U-
verse IPTV offer using this type of network, and it claims to
have signed up half of these since the end of July.
DSL slowdown
Nevertheless, Gonzalez concedes there has been a slowdown
in DSL growth in some developed markets over the past
year. “There has been a shift by telcos to fiber,” she says. “In
the U.S., the number of fiber customers grew by 107 percent
last year, while the number of DSL customers grew by 19
percent.”
Latest figures from Point Topic show DSL has a 66 percent
share of the broadband access pie in terms of customer
numbers, with 200 million users. Fiber has an 11 percent
share, while cable claims 22 percent of the market.
Despite fiber incursions in the U.S., Mersh expects the DSL
share to increase slightly in the future at the expense of
cable. “Cable always had a head start on us,” he
says. “We’ve been whittling that down and getting closer to
parity.”
In terms of DSL customers, China leads the pack with
44,757,000. The Chinese government has launched an
initiative to make broadband services available to 100 million
people in the next few years, says Mersh.
The U.S. is second in line, with 27,615,996 DSL customers,
while Germany is in third place with 16,893,700.
Click here for complete coverage of Broadband World Forum Europe.
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