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A new report from Pew Internet shows that broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed down to a crawl, a sign that U.S. broadband carriers would have to work hard to find ways to grow their overall businesses. Pew points out that 55 percent of adult Americans have home broadband connections.

According to some estimates there are over 64 million broadband connections in the U.S. Some additional interesting bits from Pew’s report:

The research group finds out that low income groups — households with annual incomes of less than $20,000 — have started to cut back on broadband spending. Their broadband adoption rate had dropped to 25 percent in 2008 from 28 percent in 2007. It isn’t much of a surprise, because the economic downturn is forcing people to control and cut back their spending.

Earlier this year, telecom operators like Qwest & AT&T, pointed out they were experiencing the impact of this penny pinching. Of course, what didn’t help was the fact that it was their geographic footprint that played host to the housing bubble. New home sales drove the demand for broadband connections and as foreclosures started, the broadband party also started to wind down. The net new additions for the second quarter 2008 will tell an interesting story.

My feeling is that this is hurting the DSL providers more than cable companies and they are scrambling to respond by offering higher speeds. The smaller providers like Embarq & Windstream could be impacted the worst by the slowdown.

There is some research that shows that speed bumps are not quite the panacea for these carriers, though they might provide some temporary relief.

Bruce Leichtman recently conducted a survey and found out that nearly 72 percent of cable broadband subscribers, and 62 percent of telco broadband subscribers are happy with their broadband connection’s quality and speed. Only 24 percent are interested in getting faster connection and a mere 11 percent of broadband subscribers would pay an “additional $10 per month to double their Internet speed.”

In comparison, Pew’s report shows that 35 percent of dial-up users want broadband prices to decline further — fat chance of that happening when most carriers are dreaming of tiered Internet plans. Overall 62 percent of dial-up users say they are happy to be Slowskys. (That should make AOL and United Online rather happy.)

Download Pew’s Home Broadband Report (pdf.)

DSL-based broadband service providers may have started to catch up with cable companies in pure subscriber count terms, but when it comes to speeds, U.S. DSL companies are lagging behind not only the cable companies, but their peers around the world.

Between the second and third quarters of this year, the average DSL connection speed in the U.S. (and Canada) increased a mere 0.17 percent, according to research firm Point Topic, bringing the average download speed to just 2.971 megabits per second.

In comparison, the speeds in South & East Asia went up 132 percent to 3.582 Mbps, while Asia Pacific saw speeds increase 38.79 percent to 14.989 Mbps. Speeds in Western Europe gained by 6.22 percent to 5.552 Mbps, and in Eastern Europe, speeds are up 6.59 percent to 2.443 Mbps. In Latin America, speeds rose 29.06 percent to 1.652 Mbps, while the Middle East & Africa saw speeds dip 0.71 percent, to 1.404 Mbps. The carriers that gave DSL speeds a nudge include Korea Telecom, NTT, China Telecom, Fast Web, Telecom Argentina, and Telefonica and its affiliates.