Broadband : Penetration & Pricing

There might be several definitions for the term "broadband". Here I use this term to refer to services which run on channels / infrastructures other than those utilized by traditional voice services. Usually it should be faster than 64 kbps. Practically it denotes services using xDSL, FTTx, Cable/HFC or novel state-of-the-art wireless technologies. Some numerical data presented in this post are taken from Point Topic and REACH. Those are actually rather outdated (2004). But some characteristics concluded from those might remain similar and could be used as an approximation for our current situation.


As of 2004, the market share of installed broadband lines in APAC region is larger compared to that of the EMEA region or the American continent (see the picture). At that time, there are around 45 mn broadband lines / subscribers in the whole APAC region. This is about twice of the number of broadband lines in the whole America. This fact might have a direct or indirect impact on the pricing scheme. As you can see in the picture, bandwidth in countries like South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong is (much) cheaper than that in other countries. In Japan, the "champion" country in this case, one can have a 45 Mbps connection for USD 36 a month. Yes, okay, if we look at India, Malaysia, Singapore etc. the statement above is not (yet) applicable. But the global trend "faster but cheaper" has propagated and now reached those states. Hopefully soon, I could update this post with more actual data. Whether some of you have those already ?!