Average residential downstream broadband speeds have increased significantly

Average residential DSL downstream speeds have increased in Asia Pacific, Latin America, South East Asia, Western and Eastern Europe over the middle two quarters of 2007. In North America and the Middle East and Africa region average residential downstream speeds remained relatively unchanged.

“The most significant changes were seen in Asia Pacific and South and East Asia,” says Fiona Vanier, Research Analyst at Point Topic, “This is due to operators such as China Tietong and NTT which have introduced services with downstream speeds as high as 100,000 Kbps.”

In fact, the largest change took place in South and East Asia, where the average downstream speed picked up by over 130%. Those operators who significantly contributed to the growth were China Tietong and China Telecom.

China Tietong launched a new range of services (A1 – A7 Unlimited) with downstream speeds ranging from 512 Kbps to 4,000 Kbps, and introduced the J1 Shared 100M VDSL service with a 100,000 Kbps downstream speed. China Telecom expanded its existing Home ASDL Unlimited range of services with downstream speeds ranging from 512 to 2,000 Kbps.

Japanese incumbent NTT has made a significant impact on a 39% growth of the average downstream speed in Asia Pacific. The operator extended its FLET’s ADSL range to incorporate three new services which offer downstream speeds as high as 100 Mbps.

The contribution to the significant increase of Latin America made Telecom Argentina and Telefonica Argentina. The growth for the whole region is estimated at 29%.