2023.01.20- Open Broadband News

Over 1.3 billion fixed broadband connections 

By the end of Q3 2022, the number of global fixed broadband connections grew by 1.87 percent and stood at 1.34 billion. Point Topic recorded a decline in fixed broadband subscriptions in eleven countries which mainly include emerging markets, as well as a handful of mature markets of well developed countries.

Other main trends in Q3 2022 included:

• Global fixed broadband subscriber growth was highest in the last four quarters but slower than in Q3 2021.
• Out of all regions, Asia Other saw the fastest growth in broadband connections (2.6 percent), mainly due to low broadband penetration and healthy increases in broadband subscribers in India, Nepal, Malaysia and UAE.
• The share of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Building in the total fixed broadband subscriptions continued to increase and stood at 65 percent. Superfast and ultrafast cable broadband connections followed with a 17 percent share, while ADSL fell to 9 percent.
• The highest fiber broadband subscriber growth rates in Q3 2022 were in India, Brazil, France and Mexico.

FCC broadband map challenges top 350K as deadline looms

States have already submitted more than 300,000 location challenges since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened the door for them to request corrections to its new and improved broadband map.

But as a deadline for availability challenges looms, some states said they’ve encountered issues with the submission process.

The FCC told Fierce Telecom that while individual challenges are visible on its broadband map interface, it is not reporting aggregate figures about the challenges it has received. So, Fierce reached out to more than 40 states to ask whether they had or planned to submit challenges to the map since the contest window opened last year.

Using their responses and public reports about challenges, Fierce determined that at least 382,799 location challenges have been filed. States submitted at least an additional 30,600 availability challenges. But given there are dozens of other states unaccounted for, the real number could actually be far, far higher.

The outlook for Ecuador’s telecoms sector in 2023 

Ecuador’s telecommunications market offers plenty of opportunities for investments and growth in 2023, especially after recent bills passed by the local legislature.

Fixed broadband penetration has grown to 56% (2.7 million accesses), but that is also comparatively low, opening up growth possibilities for the main players in this field and particularly for internet service providers, which together account for roughly a third of these accesses in the country.

The pace of this expansion and the size of the opportunities all hinge, of course, on macroeconomic factors, political stability and the consumption capacity of households, enterprises and individuals.

Telecommunications minister Vianna Maino has said that the law will boost and develop the various sectors of the Ecuadoran economy. Maino intends to advance with the implementation of the country’s 2022-25 digital transformation agenda and have most of the milestones achieved by 2024.

Chips are holding back 5G private wireless

Many private wireless deployments to date are 4G, while 5G is still waiting for next-generation chipsets.

Leo Gergs, Senior 5G Markets Analyst at ABI Research, said all the current 5G chipsets are still based on the 3GPP’s Release 15. They do provide enhanced mobile broadband. But important 5G features, such as ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), were standardized in Release 16 in 2020, and there are no chipsets on that release yet. Devices with those chips will start to appear by the end of 2023.

“What I have been seeing in the last year or two is the moment you talk about private 5G for indoor applications – like industrial or manufacturing – what these deployments require is high availability and reliability and to some extent low latency, which is what the chipsets that are in the market at this moment cannot provide,” said Gergs.

Australian broadband speeds ranked 74th in world

Australia’s fixed broadband and mobile services have both dropped in the global speed rankings – despite the billions poured into infrastructure over the past few years.

Australia now ranked 74th in the world when it comes to fixed broadband speeds, with a median download speed of 52.75 Mbps, uploads of 17.78 Mbps, and latency of 11ms.

Mobile speeds were better, with Australia sitting at 16th, with median download speeds of 83.02 Mbps, uploads of 10.45 Mbps, and 22ms latency.

Australia dropped down the rankings for both, dropping three places in mobile speeds, and one place in broadband. For comparison’s sake, Qatar, that boasts the fastest mobile speeds, enjoys 169.51 Mbps median downloads.

Singapore, leads the world in fixed broadband, with download speeds of 225.7 Mbps.