“Broadband Technology Boon for Online Gambling”

One of the factors most responsible for the boom in the online gambling industry is the increasing availability of broadband technology. Nielsen/Net Ratings are showing that Europe and Britain have caught the online gambling “fever,” a fever unlikely to subside any time soon, and made most contagious by the advent of broadband.

Nielsen/Net Ratings, an Internet research company, is reporting that with 3.2 million Brits visiting a gambling site in February, there was a 45% increase in the number of gambling site visitors over last year at the same time. This tremendous growth is being attributed both in the UK and in Europe to the ever-increasing availability of broadband technology. In that same month of February, there were approximately 14 million Europeans visiting gambling and sweepstakes Internet sites.

Europe of course is not a “uniform” nation, and the statistics vary widely depending on which countries in Europe are under discussion. For instance, the highest number of Internet gamblers seem to be coming from France and Sweden, while in southern Europe the advent of online gambling still has yet to catch on. In Spain and Italy, it appears that people are still finding other forms of entertainment more appealing; only 10% of the populations in those countries have visited gambling and sweepstakes sites.

UK gamblers love the speed and convenience of betting online, and they seem to particularly love using that speed and convenience to visit the National Lottery site; over 1.3 million of them accessed this most popular site in February of 2005. Other sites popular with the Brits, according to a study done by Nielsen/Net Ratings, are: William Hill, Partypoker.com, Ladbrokes, Pacific Poker, Cyberslotz, The Gaming Club, Golden Palace Online Casino, and Vernons.

Naturally, use of the high speed Internet cuts down on the amount of time that online gamblers in the UK need to spend online. Online gamblers with slower connections end up spending an average of 29 minutes online, while the ¾ of UK online gamblers who have the fast connection only have to spend 20.