The quarterly broadband growth rate in Q2 2006 has been the lowest ever, only 7.1% worldwide, quite a significant drop from 8.5% at the end of 2005. The data comes from the latest report from Point Topic, 'World Broadband Statistics: Q2 2006', using data to 30 June 2006. Despite the slight increase from 4.35% to 4.50% in Q2, Asia Pacific was still the region with the lowest growth rate, primarily due to the saturation in the broadband market. Similarly, North America and Western Europe also suffered from this effect and only managed to achieve 4.82% and 5.64% quarterly growth respectively. The growth in DSL has slowed down gradually since Q3 2005. It is more apparent in Asian-Pacific countries such as South Korea and Japan where a significant number of subscribers have migrated from DSL to FTTx. Cable modem has been doing well, but also reported a decline in growth during Q2. In terms of the total number of broadband lines added in Q2, China once again added significantly more lines than the USA , with an net addition of 5.1mn lines, boosting the country total to 46mn lines, accounting for almost 19% of the world's broadband total.
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