plan to people’s desire to curtail entertainment new Parks Associates’ study found that household broadband service jumped 18% worldwide in 2008 alone and projects that more than 640 mil-lion outside the home and improve their home entertain-ment options. households worldwide will have broadband One broadband service that is enjoying greater take-up despite the recession is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the fi rst stage of an IP-enabled next-generation by 2013. New applications, greater public aware-ness and discussions of the stimulus plan may have even boosted broadband take-up in some countries, despite the recession. There was strong growth in broadband subscribers in the USA with China, Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Canada also looking strong (Insight 12). network for many countries. Although VoIP estimates are increasingly diffi cult to make, owing to the diffi culties of estimating PC-to-PC us-ers, VoIP traffi c and VoIP subscribers have increased steadily by all metrics. TeleGeography Inc. (2008) estimates that VoIP accounted for an estimated 25% of international voice traffi c in 2008, with Skype alone accounting for 8%. There were between 69-80 million VoIP subscribers in 2008. 83 In the United States, the Pew Internet & Ameri-can Life Project report on broadband penetration released in June showed that the percentage of US homes with access to high-speed internet access continued to rise, despite the current recession.82 The survey, conducted by Pew in April, found that 63% of adult Americans now have broadband Internet connections at home, compared with 55% of adult Americans in 2008. These results led Pew to con-clude According to ITU’s most recent regulatory survey tracking the regulatory treatment of VoIP for 191 countries since 2004, by mid-2009, over two-thirds of countries now allow VoIP, with 92 countries that have explicitly legalized VoIP, while another 39 tolerate VoIP (Figure 9, bottom chart). Point Topic estimates that contractual VoIP subscribers now account for some 7% of fi xed lines at the end of Q1 2009 and some 21% of broadband subscribers (Figure 9, top chart). In recessionary times, when that “broadband adoption appears to have been largely immune to the effects of the current economic recession”, which commentators have at-tributed to greater public awareness of the benefi ts of broadband following news coverage of the stimu-lus 70