There were more than 41 million new residential and business DSL subscribers in 2005, according to a report compiled by Point Topic for the DSL Forum. At the end of 2005, there were 138.8 million broadband DSL subscribers globally.

Regionally, the European Union (EU) remained the largest DSL population worldwide, adding 16.7 million subscribers in the year – a growth of 53 percent. Europe has a total of 48.2 million DSL subscribers, almost 35 percent of the world market.

The Middle East and Africa was the fastest growing region, increasing its DSL subscriber base by 112.5 percent in 2005, to reach a total of almost 3 million. Turkey added more than one million new subscribers and accounted for almost 70 percent of the region’s growth in the year.

Latin America saw a growth of 79 percent to reach 6.37 million DSL subscribers, led principally by subscriber increases in Brazil (up 1.27 million) and Mexico (up 912,000).

China, which has the highest DSL country population worldwide, added 9.4 million new subscribers in 2005, and now accounts for almost 94 percent of the total subscriber base in South and South East Asia.

The U.S., one of the first markets to deploy DSL commercially, remains the second largest country in the world for this access technology. In North America, DSL continued its progress with Canada reaching 16.8 percent DSL penetration of phone lines.