India in Top Three Countries Worldwide for Global Broadband Growth

India’s phenomenal growth in broadband in 2010 –second only to China and the United States – is leading towards the country soon becoming one of the top ten users of broadband in the world. India added more than 2.5 million new lines of broadband last year and now stands at No13 in the world – having been barely in the top 50 of broadband countries just six years ago.
“There has been tremendous and consistent growth in broadband across India in recent years, yet this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Broadband Forum Chief Executive Officer Robin Mersh. “Both fixed and wireless broadband options abound, and the Broadband Forum is doing all it can to help India’s providers engineer smarter and faster networks.”
Looking at the global picture, international IPTV subscription had a record 34.6% growth in 2010 according to the figures prepared by Point Topicand announced by the Broadband Forum. 2010 was also a landmark year for broadband subscriptions – following the milestone half billion lines achieved in July 2010, subscriber figures continued to climb steadily and ended the year at 523,066,022 – a net addition of over 55 million lines during the year. With more and more devices coming online and broadband growing at such a steady rate, the timing could not be better for the release of BroadbandSuite 4.0, the IPv6 Toolkit of the Broadband Forum.
The final quarter of 2010 followed a similar pattern to the rest of the year in terms of percentage growth in broadband subscribers, reflecting a steady and sustained increase which was broadly in line with the previous two years. Asia is set to overtake Europe during 2011 with China still dominating the rankings both for total subscribers and net additions, as well as in percentage growth terms.
Meanwhile by the end of 2010 the total number of IPTV subscribers had reached almost 45.4 million, representing over 11.5 million new subscribers over the year and an annual increase of 34.6%. The fourth quarter was the strongest quarter for IPTV growth, adding more than 3.4 million new subscribers and accounting for 8% of the total growth.
With great broadband commercial success comes real world logistical problems – the surge of new devices coming online will soon exhaust the IPv4 address pool. To address this looming problem, the Broadband Forum has been focusing its resources to ensure specifications are in place for a smooth integration of the new Internet protocol, IPv6 into network and device management around the world.