A new report from market research firm Datamonitor suggests there are now more than 6.3 million households in Western Europe subscribing to online services, and that Germany, the UK and the Netherlands are the largest markets with a total of 4 million residential subscribers. German national telecoms operator Deutsche Telekom accounts for around half that figure with 2.2 million residential subscribers, dwarfing the entire UK market which has around 1.35 million online homes. The new figures show that the most significant change over the last year has been in the Dutch market with the number of residential subscribers climbing 254% from 144,000 to around 510,000. At the other end of the scale, Hungary still trails the rest of Europe: at the end of 1997 there were around 25,000 Hungarian households with an internet connection, penetration of 0.7% compared to an average of 4% for Western Europe as a whole.
