The increase is mainly caused by more people having a 50 Mbps connection, after some providers increased download speeds in the past year. A total 12 percent of consumers don’t yet have at least 50Mbps broadband and expect to need it within the next two years, the Telecompaper survey on consumer broadband interests found. This suggests a potential market of 840,000 households for the faster broadband services, up from 700,000 a year ago. The proportion still uncertain whether they will ever need 50+ Mbps was stable compared to the same survey last year, at approximately a third of consumers.
As 50 Mbps is already quite common and no longer considered something for the future like when the survey was first conducted in 2009, the speeds of 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps were added this year. The resulting survey found that almost a third (32%) of consumers expect to need 200 Mbps at some point in the future, including 3 percent who can already download at 200 Mbps over fibre networks.
The survey in previous years found consumers expected to need fibre technology in order to access speeds of at least 50 Mbps. As 50 Mbps offers have become more prevalent on the market, consumers see that other technologies can also suffice. However for 200 Mbps, almost two thirds of the Dutch still expect to need fibre. Notably, many more consumers answered mobile internet as a technology for faster broadband in the future, probably due to the recent introduction of LTE.
The report ‘Dutch Consumer Connected 2013’ is based on the Telecompaper Consumer Panel, an online survey conducted between March and May 2013 among almost 15,000 consumers aged 12-80.
