More than 50,000 European homes and offices added a high-speed broadband Internet connection every day last year, the European Commission said Wednesday.
Increasing competition has cut prices to new lows as Internet speeds increase, it said, while mobile Internet 3G services doubled last year to 88 million users, some 20 percent of the EU’s population.
Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands now top a world league table for the percentage of people with broadband Internet, it said, although the European Union as a whole lags behind other major world regions with a “broadband penetration rate” of 20 percent.
More than half of broadband connections have speeds of 2 megabytes to 10 megabytes per second although there is now a “significant amount” of connections with more than 10 megabytes per second.
Some 19 million broadband lines were added across Europe last year, generating revenues of EU62 billion (US$98 billion) for telecommunications companies.
But the EU executive again criticized former state telecoms monopolies for keeping a tight grip on the telecoms market, saying they hold nearly half of broadband lines across the EU.
It said newer rivals still have limited access to telecoms lines that would allow them to provide more connections to customers.
The European Commission also repeated a warning that mobile phone operators are charging customers too much for data roaming, using mobile Internet services and text messaging when they go abroad.
“If operators do not react by July 2009, regulation will be inevitable,” it said.
Text messages made up 14 percent of telecoms companies’ revenues in 2007.
The entire telecoms sector in the European Union was worth nearly EU300 billion (US$473 billion) last year, growing by 1.9 percent from 2006.
A large chunk of those revenues — EU137 billion (US$216 billion) — come from mobile phones. Prices fell 14 percent as the EU introduced a price cap on voice call roaming….