Broadband UP 108%
N
N
0Overall Score

A report tabled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) claims that new communication legislation has pumped $12.4 billion into the Australian economy.

A report tabled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in Federal Parliament yesterday claims that the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry has pumped $12.4 billion into the Australian economy, with mobile and broadband communications fuelling the expansion.The government body’s annual telecoms performance report says broadband customer numbers were up 108 per cent to around 2.1 million and there was a 158 per cent increase in total data volumes downloaded between 2004 and 2005. Internet subscribers, both dial-up and broadband, now number 5.98 million, up 15 percent.

“The highly competitive Internet market is experiencing a period of rapid transition,” said Lyn Maddock acting ACMA chair. “During 2004-05, broadband services became more affordable and higher data rate broadband services increasingly available, providing the platform for more widespread take-up of high bandwidth applications such as video-streaming.” Dial-up internet subscribers fell by four per cent to 4.18 million.

Australians now have 18.4 million mobile phones (90pc of the population), and 7.7 million handsets were sold in the last year.Telcos are happily munching on the proceeds of 6.74 billion SMS messages sent over the same period, a leap of 33 percent over the previous year. The number of MMS messages leapt 264 percent to

49.8 million.In its first peek at the impact of the first year of the Spam Act, ACMA found a 50 percent reduction in spam originating in Australia.The number of fixed line phones declined by two per cent in the last 12 months. The number of Internet service providers declined by five to 689.