Asian Broadband Userbase to Quadruple by End-'03
[March 28, 2000] A new report by the technology research firm Yankee Group, a subsidiary of Primark Corporation, indicates that new competition will accelerate Asia's race towards broadband penetration.
According to Yankee, the overly cautious approach of Asia's incumbent carriers towards providing mass-market broadband access has been a setback for local broadband access take-up in Asia.
With the emergence of new competitors as well as a burgeoning demand for high-speed Internet services, incumbent carriers are ramping up their broadband access rollout plans, despite their concerns over the threat to traditional service revenue streams and their hefty legacy network investments.
The Yankee Group's Asia-Pacific division forecasts that broadband subscribers in the region will increase from about 452,900 at year-end 1999 to approximately 11.3 million by the end of 2003.
Among various broadband access technologies, cable modem and asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) are expected to serve as primary network technologies, accounting for 46% and 42% of broadband subscribers in Asia by year-end 2003, respectively. On the other hand, Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) and satellite will eventually become niche services to connect users without the basic communications infrastructures.
Just as the competition between competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) in the United States is fueling the demand for broadband access in the US market, a similar pattern is found in Asia.
Currently, the region's major incumbent operators are facing an onslaught of competition from new contenders such as Global Crossing and Level 3, which are building broadband networks directly to customers and providing them with innovative services in major metropolitan areas.
The report notes that competitors across the region have one thing in common: they have initially targeted small office/home office (SOHO) and small and medium enterprise (SME) customers for the deployment of broadband access services and are increasingly interested in tapping the mass market through employing a wide variety of marketing ploys.
"Broadband access is primarily being marketed as a high-speed Internet access service in nearly all the key Asian markets," says Agatha Poon, an analyst on the Yankee Group's Asia-Pacific team. "In order to make a palpable boost to broadband access demand, service providers are expected to focus more on developing broadband Internet content."
The recent Yankee Group Report, "Broadband Subscribers in Asia: 1999-2003 Review and Forecast", provides a summary of broadband service deployments and prospects in leading Asia-Pacific markets, with a particular focus on two leading broadband access technologies: ADSL and cable modem.
-Asia CyberAtlas |
