With a growth explosion in Australasian broadband it’s a good thing that Southern Cross was upgraded to provide plenty of capacity.
It’s common knowledge that the Australasian broadband market is having a growth spurt, with various observers recently reporting that Australia alone now has over one million broadband connections.
The most recent official count from the Australian market regulator (the ACCC) put the total number of broadband subscribers in Australia at 698,700 having grown 92.2% in the year to December 2003.
But since then there have been some big changes, the most important being substantial retail price reductions for access. This opened up broadband to the mass market and we now expect Australasian growth will continue at an annual rate of 500,000 new subscribers over the next few years.
The market is also undergoing another fundamental transformation - Australians are now consuming more data. More and more access plans support unlimited data downloads and affordable plans that come with much higher data caps are now entrenched, allowing Australians to reap the real benefits of broadband without the fear of nasty surprises in their monthly Internet bill.
Not surprisingly all this broadband growth has led to accelerating activations of Southern Cross capacity. The annual rate has increased from 18% in July 2003 to 40% in July 2004. Southern Cross’s Director Sales and Marketing, Ross Pfeffer says this growth is just the beginning. “Activations are running hot and the re-sale market is changing rapidly because broadband has really taken off. What’s more the fundamentals are in place for sustained rapid growth in the demand for capacity. Broadband is good news, for our customers who have experienced huge increase in their numbers of broadband subscribers, and its good news for the utilization of Southern Cross capacity”.
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