Brussels, 26/11/2010 (Agence Europe) - According to information published by the European Commission on Thursday 25 November, broadband connections in Europe are much faster than one year ago but the European Union still has a long way to go if it is to reach its targets of giving every European access to basic broadband by 2013 and fast and ultra fast broadband by 2020. These objectives are outlined in the Digital Agenda for Europe which seeks to provide consumers with high quality, widely available and attractively priced digital services. Greater data transmission speeds generally provide customers with more and better choice of services at a lower price per megabit, the Commission points out. “We need to do more … We need urgent agreement on our proposal to ensure radio spectrum is available for mobile broadband, for which demand is growing very fast,” said Commission Vice-President with responsibility for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes.
The statistics reveal the following trends in the EU between July 2009 and July 2010:
more and faster broadband connections. 29% of broadband lines now have speeds of at least 10 megabits per second (Mbps) compared with 15% in July 2009. 5% of lines have average speeds at or above 30 Mbps and only 0.5% at or above 100 Mbps. The number of broadband lines continued to grow, though only by 8%, after 11% growth between 2008 and 2009. As of July 2010 there were around 128 million fixed broadband lines in the EU.
more broadband subscriptions. The Netherlands and Denmark continue to be world leaders in broadband take up with nearly 40 lines per 100 citizens, reaching about 80% of households though Greece and the Czech Republic made the greatest progress in the last year. Nine EU countries have levels of broadband take up higher than the United States (US levels are 26.4 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants). Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) remains the most common technology to access broadband in Europe with 100 million lines, but its market share is declining in favour of higher-speed fibre architectures and cable with Docsis 3.0.
spectacular growth in mobile broadband. Mobile broadband access is taking off in a number of member states, in particular Finland (21.5 mobile broadband dedicated access lines through usb-keys/datacards/dongles per 100 citizens), Austria (16.7), Sweden (14), Denmark (13.4) and Portugal (12.1). Current mobile broadband penetration in Europe stands at 6%, a 45% increase since July 2009.
incumbent telecoms operators slipping. The average market share of incumbent telecoms operators fell slightly to around 44%. They remain strongest in Cyprus (76%), Finland (68%) and Luxembourg (66%), and are weakest in Romania and the UK (28% each). Incumbent domination of broadband markets is structurally in decline to the benefit of infrastructure-based competition (basically through local loop unbundling that enables access to the network by third parties). (I.L./transl.rt)