The state of Australian Broadband

In a new internet activity survey which was released on Thursday April 24, results collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveal Australian’s took up broadband and wireless internet connections in record numbers during 2007, in fact at the end of the December quarter, there were 7.10 million subscribers to the Internet in Australia. Of which compromised 964,000 business and government subscribers and 6.14 million household subscribers. With Australia’s population around 21.2m, that’s not too shabby when it comes to household use, but business and government subscribers seem to be on the low side.

Be sure to tun in to Tech Talk Radio this Monday 28/4/08 for a discussion on the state of broadband inn the nation.

This release contains results from all ISPs operating in Australia as at 31 December 2007. For December quarter 2007 there were 421 operating ISPs contributing to the estimates.

The number of non dial-up subscribers recorded at the end of December 2007 was 5.21 million, compared with dial-up subscribers of 1.89 million – an increase of 33% since September 2006.

Most of those were converts from dial-up rather than new internet users, but the total number of internet connections did increase over that period 6.65 million to 7.1 million.

The biggest change to our connectivity in 2007 was the arrival of wireless broadband. Over 481,000 people were connected to wireless broadband at the end of the December 2007, compared with 186,000 connected in September 2006, once again a substantial increase.

Connections with download speeds of 1.5Mbps or greater increased to 2.51 million or 35% of subscribers in December 2007, compared to 1.13 million or 17% of subscribers at the end of September 2006. For December 2007 a breakdown of higher download speeds has been released for the first time.

~ by andrewmccolm on April 25, 2008.