The rankings are released by Point Topic Global broadband analysis, a global research centre. According to the statistics, there are around 382. 4 million broadband subscribers worldwide by the end of August 2008 as compared with 317 million in August 2007, showing 17 percent growth.

Regional Broadband trend revealed that Western Europe has the largest share of broadband users with 26 percent followed by North America at 22 percent. South and East Asia regional is in the third place with 22 percent share.

In Pakistan operators are offering wide range of technologies like DSL, Cable, FTTH and WiMax. They have added 25,500 new broadband connections in the financial year 2007-08, which is around 150 percent increase compared to the previous financial year, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) statistics reported.

The Internet Protocol (IP) traffic through high-speed access link has become the success factor that have made rapid the transfer of online information and communication services, data, voice and video footage. The easy way of communication owing to highly competitive market of service providers has been penetrating in the country with modest acceleration in the metropolis.

Read the full story in Daily Times here.

This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).

The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.

The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

In the region’s high-income economies, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong (China) and Japan have launched one-Gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband and triple-play services aimed at the residential market, featuring applications such as Internet telephony and television. The Republic of Korea leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access, and no less than five economies in the top ten are from Asia-Pacific. The Republic of Korea, Hong Kong (China), and Japan also lead the world in terms of the proportion of households with fibre optic connections, essential for supporting the next generation of ultra-high speed Internet applications.

These high-income economies are also leaders in terms of third generation (3G) mobile cellular deployment. Fixed and mobile broadband technologies complement each other and users enjoy continuous high-speed Internet access. In Singapore, a ubiquitous Internet access plan combining unlimited 8 Megabits per second (Mbps) fixed broadband, 2 Mbps mobile broadband and access at some 800 Wi-Fi hotspots is available for just USD 35 per month.

At the other extreme, in most of the region’s low and lower-middle income economies, high-speed Internet access is limited to urban areas at best, typically expensive, and often not available at all. The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fixed broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants, 2007

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Hong Kong (China), the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

While in low and lower-middle income economies mobile phones have become a substitute for the shortage of fixed lines, they are not yet fulfilling the potential of broadband access. By the end of 2007, only Indonesia, the Maldives, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had commercially deployed WCDMA networks. The region’s two largest mobile markets, China and India, have yet to launch mobile broadband. By the end of 2007, there were over 120 million mobile broadband subscribers in the region (Figure 2), but almost all (97 per cent) were in high income economies.

Figure 2: Mobile cellular broadband subscribers in Asia-Pacific

While the region’s high-income economies are pushing the frontier of broadband bandwidth to a point where applications have yet to catch up, many Asia-Pacific developing economies are bandwidth starved, inhibiting the development of their information societies.

The ITU Report argues that broadband uptake enables a range of socially desirable and valuable online services in areas such as government, education and health. The use of broadband technologies can help overcome many of the basic development challenges faced by poor countries. The Report provides a number of examples where broadband connectivity has acted as a catalyst for development. These include the provision of education through distance learning in the Solomon Islands, the creation of jobs through business incubators for women in China, and the supply of communication services for disaster management in Myanmar.

Read the press release here. Full report is not yet available in the public domain.

(Please click on the images for a better view)

ACM: Ubiquity – Cerf’s Up Again! — A New Ubiquity Interview with Vint Cerf

CERF: Well, certainly that has happened in the sense that the mobile telephony has allowed the provision of communication services, and let me include in that Internet access, in places where it was very difficult to obtain that service before. And so, I think roughly the number of telephone terminations has more than doubled in the last five years. It’s gone from a little over a billion to a little over 2.3 billion. And the 1.3 billion of the 2.3 billion are mobile telephones. So, it has had a tidal wave effect on access to both mobile telephony and also the many instances in the GSM system anyway of short messaging. It’s extremely popular. And these devices are becoming increasingly Internet-capable. So, you’re seeing people use these things for navigation. They use them for some certain amount of Web surfing, for identifying products and services that they’re interested in. These devices are becoming much more elaborate than they were ever before. They have a lot of horsepower, a lot of compute power, a lot of memory. Some of the displays are getting bigger. So, it’s very much a universal tool. I’m even seeing financial transactions being done through these mobile telephones. And this of course adds a certain degree of convenience. You don’t need a credit card anymore. It’s your mobile phone that is making the payments.UBIQUITY: So you don’t think it’s too fanciful to think that leapfrogging would continue to work and that the kind of rich environment that you were talking about just a minute ago could be realistically obtained by countries that are now underdeveloped?

CERF: I want to be a little careful about the leapfrog argument because mobile telephony doesn’t have the same potential capacity that the wire line does, especially optical fiber or coaxial cable. And so I think that many countries that are experiencing this huge influx of traditional mobile telephony, if I can call it that, may still be constrained as to the applications they can support over the air. So they have to find a way to mature wire line capability concurrently with the mobile, at least that’s my view. It’s possible that some of the broadband wireless capabilities can be used as a substitute. Ultra wideband radio, for example, and maybe WiMax would be alternatives to wire line, but I think we should be very cautious about predicting massive leapfrogging merely as a consequence of mobile telephony deployment. I think it’s also very important in economic terms to recognize that the use of these technologies for economic gain require a certain amount of infrastructure to be in place, not only physical infrastructure but trained people who can operate various pieces of equipment and know how to configure things and the like. And so, at the same time there’s investment in physical facilities there has to be a serious investment in training so as to create a local population that’s able to operate with these increasingly complex systems.

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The first Keynote speaker, Zhengmao Li, VP China Unicom, described the efforts of the Chinese govt and his company in building a harmonious digital society. Thanks to the govt’s policy to provide access to ICTs on an equitable and affordable basis, more than 97 percent of administrative villages in China have a phone.
The second Keynote speaker, Tom Philips, Chief Regulatory Officer at the GSM Association forcefully argued that USO programs in most parts of the world have not resulted in improved access but have rather harmed the objective of connecting those who currently do not have access. Mobile telephony provides service to 2.5 billion people, 80 percent of them are connected via GSM. The GSM Association identified the cost of a handset to be the single biggest barrier to ownership. In order to reduce that barrier, a new initiative was launched that resulted in the $20 mobile handset developed by Motorola.

However, some of the other barriers to access revolve around governments. High taxation on mobile services has been identified as one such barrier. In some countries, mobile providers are the single biggest tax payers. In Mr Philips’ view, USO funding policy is holding back ubiquitous telephone service rather than promoting it. A study of 90 different countries found about a third of them collect USO funds. Mobile networks currently cover 80% of the world’s population. Mr Philips asserted that 100% coverage of population is achievable if USO fund can be directed for mobile network deployment rather than to landline and fixed infrastructure. Of the $6 billion that is being collected in USO funds from around the world, excluding the USA, only quarter has been spend on the telecom sector. By the end of the decade, USO funds globally will rise to $10 billion.

Although the mobile industry has contributed $2 billion out of the $6 billion in USO funds collected, Mr Philips argued that only $75 million, or less than 1 percent, has been put back into the mobile sector. This is especially surprising considering that mobile technology is seen to be 10 times more cost effective than fixed in providing connectivity to the unconnected.
Mr Philips argued that USO programs should be phased out over time. The $4.4 billion in unspent USO funds should be spent for what it was collected for–for connecting those who are not connected today by the most cost effective manner.

An excellent panel discussion followed where Martin Hilbert from ECLAC, Roger Marks from IEEE and Rob Frieden from Penn State participated. The video from this session can be found here [140MB!]

Roger Marks, Chair of the IEEE 802.16 Working Group discussed the initiative to develop a nationwide broadband wireless acess system for low cost access by finalizing a new standard.
Martin Hilbert, disagreed with Mr Philip’s view that USO programs should be phased out. According to him, GSM Association’s $20 Motorola handset was too expensive for the vast majority. Hence, he argued, that universal access funds are absolutely necessary to provide access to everyone. He estmated that higher end of society can spend about $50 a month on ICTs versus $2 a month for the poorer people. In his opinion, a poor person would have to spend a year’s salary in order to buy a $20 mobile phone.

Rob Frieden, Professor at Penn State University while assessing United States’ USO program seemed to agree with many of Tom Philip’s arguments. The US has the world’s largest USO program that has collected around $30 billion over a 20 year period. In his view, any USO mechanism based on voice minutes per use will trend to “0.” He argued that you cant
fund universal service if the service costs nothing, as voice calls move to the Internet.

USO funds are a distortion of the marketplace especially if it is not spent. It tends to perpetuates the status quo and voice services. He gave the example of the US, where for many years wireless service didn’t even qualify for USO fuding. This is the case in many developing countries currently. The other major problem is that USO disbursement is not calibrated to the expendable income of the beneficiary. Any US rural resident is eligible for USO subsidy disregarding the person’s income and ability to pay for communication services.
Rob Frieden upheld the Grameen model as something all USO programs should try to emulate. The Grameen Phone model
is private, not govt, its entrepreunerial, its foward-looking, its inexpensive its self-sustaining, its streamlined and its successful. All the criteria one would want to see in an USO progran. When juxtaposes with USO programs in the US and elsewhere he finds that they are: Government driven, distorts the marketplace, promotes interest of incumbent carrier and status quo, bureaucratic, complex, vulnerable to fraud, and not necessarily successful.
He concluded by describing what USO programs ought to be. In his view, USO programs ought to be technology neutral that promotes universal access, create incentives for demand aggregation by community champions, encourage competition by reverse auction for access to subsidy etc.