The UK is now the sixth largest broadband nation in the world with nearly 17.7 million broadband users by the end of the first quarter 2009 with France only just pipping the UK in to fifth place as they hit the 18 million mark according to the results released by the Broadband Forum and Point-Topic.com.
From the same period last year the UK had 16.3 million broadband users which has increased by about 1.34 million to 17.7 million.
China and America are a long way in front of everyone else, with China having 88 million broadband lines closely followed by the USA with 83 million lines, Japan were in third spot with 30.6 million broadband lines.
The full table of top 10 countries with broadband lines can be seen below:
| Country |
2008 Q1 |
2009 Q1 |
| China |
71,034,820 |
88,088,000 |
| USA |
72,581,920 |
83,968,547 |
| Japan |
28,836,100 |
30,631,900 |
| Germany |
21,077,450 |
24,144,350 |
| France |
16,186,996 |
18,009,500 |
| UK |
16,318,300 |
17,661,100 |
| South Korea |
14,970,775 |
15,709,771 |
| Italy |
11,300,077 |
12,447,533 |
| Brazil |
7,949,000 |
10,065,200 |
| Canada |
8,859,868 |
9,533,500 |
Despite the face that it is not until you hit fourth spot with Germany that there is a European country we still find that Western Europe has the largest number of broadband subscribers with 108 million, South and East Asia were on 99 million.
The total number of broadband lines worldwide came to 429.2 million with the top 10 countries in the list above accounting for 310 million of these.
The market share in terms of how users are getting their broadband still shows that currently DSL technology is leading the way with around 65% of users, Cable broadband has about 21% and Fibre has over 12%. Wireless and other technologies make up less 2.5%.
What we look forward to seeing over the coming years is the increase in fibre broadband which will likely result in the DSL technology reducing as more and more switch to next generation high speed Internet access.
