Decline in Net accounts

["Ang Peng Hwa (Assoc Prof)" <TPHANG@ntu.edu.sg>]

Folks,

The following is story is excerpted (http://www.newsscan.com/) Newscan. I
believe I came across a similar report from Newsbytes that the Net household
subscriptions also declined in Australia.

If so, Asia should expect a decline in the next year or so starting from the
more Net-developed countries such as Japan, Singapore. Korea and HK.


U.S. NET POPULATION DECLINES FOR FIRST TIME IN 20 YEARS
The overall number of U.S. household Internet accounts declined 0.29
percent during the first quarter of 2001 to 68.5 million, according to a
survey by Telecommunications Reports International. Previous studies had
pegged growth averaging about 20 percent per quarter. "The study indicates
that
this drop was due to subscriber accounts lost when the free ISP market saw
several companies cease operation," says TRI. "The number of subscribers in
that sector plummeted more than 19 percent during the first quarter."
Free ISPs such as NetZero, AltaVista and Kmart's Bluelight.com recently were
forced to shut down or move to fee-based services when online advertising
revenues dried up. Meanwhile, growth for paid dial-up access was up more
than
7 percent to nearly 50 million subscribers during the first quarter of
2001, although a TRI managing editor warned that there were signs of
maturation in the market: "[The free ISPs] were a factor, but not the whole
story.
We think it's a maturation in that the universe of people who are going
online have done so already." (E-Commerce Times 9 May 2001)
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/9578.html

Regards,
Peng Hwa

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