Bandwidth-Hungry Consumers

North America has 23.1m broadband households, up 4.3m on last year, according to technology researcher Forrester, which expects the number to triple by 2009. Even faster growth is predicted or DVRs and camera phones.

Broadband users have significantly different behaviour to dial-up, being more likely to shop, bank, book travel and get healthcare information online, and more likely to adopt new technologies like home networks, according to Forrester's annual Consumer Technographics(tm) 2004 North American Benchmark Study.

The survey found that 19.4% of North American households connect to the Internet using broadband connections, with the majority still served by cable companies (60.6% of the broadband households) but with DSL usage growing faster - between 2001 and 2003, Forrester says that 'DSL connections grew by 5.7% while cable subscribers fell 6.5%'.

Forrester projects that the market for home networks will grow from 10 million households in 2003 to more than 46 million households by 2009, due to consumers' 'increasing desire to access the Internet from multiple rooms in their homes'. For other high bandwidth / rich media technologies, Forrester predicts an even faster growth rate to 2009: digital video recorders (DVRs) will grow tenfold and camera phones twenty-fold from 2.7m households in 2003 to 58 million.

Broadband households have a different profile to dial-up in many respects, earning 27% more, spending 52% more time online and being generally more optimistic about technology than dial-up consumers. They are also more likely to shop online and have spent over $80 more per head online in the past three months than dial-up users.

Two in five households bank online, up from one-third last year. More than half of all US broadband households check their account balances online, and one-third pay bills online.

The survey gathers data from just over 60,000 North American households and contains 660 data points in categories like devices, telecom, retail, healthcare, and finance, and data on 218 consumer brands.

Forrester is based in Cambridge, Mass., USA and its web site is at www.forrester.com

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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