Owing to its strategic location on the fringes of European mainland, The Netherlands enjoys enormous advantage in its broadband market in Europe with ambitious plans by the government.
The first quarter of 2007 saw a 3.5% growth in the broadband market of the Netherlands, nearly twice the slump when compared to the first quarter of 2006 when it was 6.6%. There were a total of 5.216 million connections as of March 31, 2007, as per the news reported by TelecomTV.
However, it’s expected that growth in the Dutch broadband market would continue at an average rate of 3% per quarter and would reach nearly 5.6 Million connections by the end of 2007. At the end of the first quarter of 2007, the broadband penetration per household went 72.8% up with a growth rate of 2.2% in comparison to the penetration at the end of 2006. On March 31, 2007, the increase in penetration per 100 inhabitants grew to 31.9% against 27.1% on March 31, 2007.
The Dutch Govt. has highly ambitious plans for its broadband market. It is eyeing to lead the broadband market by 2010 in Europe as well as worldwide. To fulfill its objective, numerous policy activities, initiatives and projects have been employed. Much of these measures involve direct funding by the Dutch Govt. including the Kenniswijk project for which 100 Million guilders (€45 million) from the Dutch Government was provided for testing new products & services within the Eindhoven region’s experimental environment.
The Netherlands has a geographic advantage, as it’s demographically located on the brink of mainland Europe, making it ideal as a landing-point for submarine cables from the North America. Due to this telecom infrastructure build has surpassed expectations given the size of the country and it has also resulted in the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) assuming importance among the heavyweight European exchanges.
In the opinion of a research analyst at RNCOS, the Dutch broadband market has few rivals across the world, thanks mainly to economic prosperity, concentrated demography, and large-scale govt. and municipal investment in the deployments of broadband. In early 2006, only Iceland was ahead of the Netherlands in broadband penetration in Europe. It’s expected that the bandwidth averages would reach 10Mb per second this year (2007) and numerous urban areas will have the ability of receiving up to 40 Mb per second.
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