Broadband access in the EU

This item, published yesterday, reports on broadband access in the EU. This is a data rich report that is worth studying in some detail. A quick scan reveals a couple of interesting points:

• The largest number of new broadband lines per 100 population and the number of new broadband lines per 100 are both Denmark ... this suggests that as the penetration gets large enough, the demand for more lines increases. At what point does this begin? Can you imagine an end to this trend?
• Figure 8 illustrates a market with robust competition ... but digging in a little further illustrates that it isn't usually infrastructure-based competition. Figure 17 shows that only 0.6% of new entrants own their own facilities ... the rest rely on the incumbent's facilities in one way or another.
• Europe is heavily DSL ... over 80% of access lines use that technology, though this distribution varies significantly by country (p. 29).

There is surely more to learn from this report ...