The number of networked homes in North America will expand to 46 million by 2009, up from 10 million in 2003, according to the market research company Forrester.
This increase is expected to boost sales of consumer electronics and access devices such as digital video recorders (DVRs) and camera phones, Forrester said. DVRs are set for a tenfold growth by 2009. The data was mined from a survey of 60,000 households.
In the past year, 4.3 million North American households started using broadband services to access the Internet, taking the total number of broadband users to 23.1 million. Forrester estimated that number will triple over the next five years, a prediction similar to a recent forecast by the Yankee Group.
Though cable companies still account for more than 60 percent of broadband connections, the growth of these services will slow, Forrester said. Between 2001 and 2003, DSL’s market share grew by 5.7 percent, whereas cable broadband’s share fell by 6.5 percent, the researchers found.
