NEWS
The broadband market has seen its worst quarter of growth since 2004, research suggests.
Point Topic, an internet connectivity research company, claims market turmoil is causing the slow growth in broadband adoption, which accelerated by only 730,000 in the second quarter of 2006. The company claims this makes it the worst three months in the last two years.
Between October 2004 and March this year, the UK added an average of 75,000 broadband lines every week. In the April-June period this fell to only 56,000 lines per week. Point Topic estimates the total number of broadband lines in the UK at the end of June was more than 11.7 million.
Although the second quarter is usually the weakest, this fall was particularly sharp. Percentage growth in the quarter was only 6.6 per cent - the lowest since broadband started.
Tim Johnson, chief executive of Point Topic said new players in the broadband market such as Carphone Warehouse and Sky are offering free broadband but this is causing confusion in the market. More than 400,000 have signed for 'free' broadband with Carphone Warehouse but are yet to receive it.
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1. Dale Saunders
Part of the problem is the great BT rip off. You pay an ISP for broadband and then have to pay BT on top to get the ADSL carrier for it. That makes it a lot more expensive than it first appears.
£17.99 sounds good but then you have to add £12.99 for line rental to BT on top. You are now facing £30 for 2 meg broadband.
Companies like Tiscali should handle their own delivery and not force the user to have a BT line.
2. Ahmed Abdelhalim
As a global phenomenon, all the major ISPs, broadband access providers, and content hosting providers are experiencing traffic growth between 50% and 100% each year. At the far end of the specturm we find the content hosting providers, and Internet exchanges currently experiencing about 100% growth each year. We believe this can be attributed to the rapid increase in broadband access worldwide, media companies placing massive content on the web, and the push towards triple and quadruple play, so if broadband adoption is slowing down in the UK at the moment, we believe this could be a temporary glitch.