DSL remains Australia's main business broadband option

Most Australian businesses are continuing to use copper DSL broadband connections, as the latest numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) adoption is experiencing slow growth in the business community.

Enterprises are taking their time to depart from superseded Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) copper broadband. The ABS figures show usage declined from just under three-quarters of the total to 70.1 percent of all connections in the three years beginning 2010-11.

During the same period the share of FTTP connections rose very slowly, from 1.5 percent in the 2010-2011 year to just two per cent in 2012-2013.

FTTP is the least used connectivity option, with the exception of dedicated links such as ATM and Frame Relay which accounted for just 0.1 percent of business connections.

Cable connections were used by 6.4 percent of businesses, more than three times that of FTTP.

Businesses with more than 200 employees were shown to be the fastest adopters of FTTP connections, with 23 percent selecting it. However 60 percent of this category still used DSL last year, according to the ABS figures.

The mining (10.1 percent) and information media and telecommunications (five percent) sectors showed the greatest uptake of FTTP connections.

Fixed wireless and mobile wireless connections are both climbing however, with the former hitting 8.9 percent of the total last year, and the latter ten percent. This is up from 6.3 percent for fixed wireless in 2010-2011 and 8.6 percent for mobile wireless in the same year.

ABS did not break down the figures into different connection variants such as ADSL2+, VDSL2, 3G, 4G, and LTE, nor did it record the service speeds or data caps.

The ABS survey also showed Australian businesses are increasingly trading over the internet, with over half placing orders through the web, and almost a third receiving them.

ABS estimates that businesses earned $246.4 billion via the internet in 2012-2013. 

The data was collected from the 2012-2013 Business Characteristics Survey.