Vic Govt report: Huge, unsated appetite for fast broadband

The Victorian Government has revealed estimates that peg the pent-up demand for broadband services above 50 Mbps in the state at some 220,000 customers - or 14 percent of its total market.

The figure is taken from a yet-to-be-released benchmarking report prepared by consultancy Access Economics.

Victorian Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development's director of science and technology policy, Matthew Dummett, told delegates of the NBN conference at CeBIT in Sydney that "NBN-grade superfast broadband demand will outstrip supply, leading to overall unmet demand."

He cited the Access figures of 220,000 customers as the current level of pent-up demand for superfast broadband in the state.

"That certainly makes some of the forecasts in the NBN implementation study look quite reasonable - in fact, quite conservative," Dummett said.

"The main driver in unmet demand will be from regional Victoria."

The report identified "about 10,000 customers" in Victoria who were currently using "what would be an NBN-style service". It predicted that figure would be one million by 2015.

The report also found demand for 3G data services in the state would grow from 1.5 million customers today to an expected five million customers by 2015, but that the use of dongles to access mobile data on PCs would "level off" after strong growth in the past few years.

Dummett also outlined other areas of unmet demand today. He said there were as many as 300,000 customers currently on ADSL1 that would move up to ADSL2 if it were available to them.

The research report was commissioned by Multimedia Victoria.

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A previous iteration of the report ran between 2003 and 2007, although the coming report had a significantly expanded scope due to developments in broadband services over the period.