The broadband explosion

For a typical exciting Sunday afternoon, I’ve been trolling through the Telstra annual report.

One statistic that leaps out at me is the growth in consumer broadband subscribers of nearly 60%, even if we assume all the 373,000 customers who ditched their dial up plans went over to broadband, that’s still a whopping 35% growth in customers.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the nine month growth in consumer broadband connections from June 2006 to March 2007 (not quite the same period) was 46%.

The decline in dial up connection was 26% over the nine months, as opposed to Telstra’s decline of 36.3% over the twelve months.

Interestingly, Telstra’s dial up decline would have been greater if their systems allow customers to transfer their existing dial up email address to broadband. As it stands, they have to retain their dial up account and we steer customers to Bigpond’s Casual User Plan as a cheap way of doing this.

So Telstra’s performance isn’t out of the line with the industry. What it does show is the massive take up of broadband. It’s also profitable, as Telstra’s report also shows their income has grown by over 66%.

Over the next few weeks I’ll have a look at how other providers are doing. It will be interesting to see how others are performing.

Similar posts:

One thought on “The broadband explosion”

  1. We were able to transfer our dial-up email address to broadband – although we had to specifically enquire about this and request it.

    It was for a business account so maybe it is only ‘home’ accounts that it can’t be done on.

    Great to see this kind of increase in broadband – reinforces the need for investment in a faster broadband network.

Leave a Reply