The growth rate in the number of Internet subscribers in Australia has slowed to a crawl of about one percent per year, new figures on Internet activity from the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests.
The nation had 12.9 million Internet subscribers at December 2015, Stats’ figures show – up just 2 percent from December 2014, or about 1 percent a year.
Almost all – or 99.3 percent to be precise – of Internet connections are now on broadband. Only 93,000 dial-up connections remain, down from 159,000 two years ago.
The biggest number of connections are made via mobile wireless at 6.02 million in December2015, followed by DSL with 5.03 million – down from 5.1 million a year ago.
There were just over a million cable connections and 645,000 fibre-to-the-premises links – the latter up from 420,000 a year ago. Indeed, in a finding doubtless music to the heart of NBN executives – and perhaps the Prime Minister – fibre has now emerged as the fastest growing connection type in both percentage terms and subscriber numbers, Stats says.
Connection speeds are also up significantly, perhaps reflecting the fibre take-up. The number of subscribers with access at better than 8Mbps has increased almost 17percent since December 2014.
