Australians have all but abandoned dial-up Internet connections, with more than 9 million subscribers, or 90 percent, now using non- dial-up connections, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That’s up 4 percent on the 7.9 million recorded a year ago
And while Stats continues to count connections as low as 256 Kbps as “broadband” it says 62 percent of all access connections have a download speed of 1.5Mbps or better,
Stats’ figures for the year to December 2009 are contained in its latest Internet Activity Report. It shows dial-up connections have dropped from
1.27 million in December 2008 to 927,000 at the end of 2009.
The big jump in non dial-up connections has been in mobile wireless: just 368,000 connected a year ago, 2.8 million today.
DSL connections rose only slightly in the same period, from 4.17 million to
4.19 million suggesting the current frequency of lower-price, bigger download advertising by ISPs and telcos is mainly concerned with poaching each other’s customers, rather than looking for growth.
On download speeds, the bureau says 3.19 million Australians now connect at speeds between 1.5 and 8Mbps, up from 2 million a year ago. Almost 2 million get access at speeds of 8-24Mbps, and 511,000 lucky souls connect at 24Mbps or better.
Volume of data downloaded has soared, from 81,352 terabytes in December 2008 to 135,674 TB in December 2009.
