SINGAPORE, June 19 (AFP) – Asia is the largest user of broadband technology in the world and there is still plenty of room for growth but regulatory obstacles must be eased, industry leaders said.

The region has been the largest wireless broadband market since 2007 and also boasted the most fixed-location broadband users last year, a telecoms conference and trade exhibition in Singapore heard.

''This is probably one of the great opportunities worldwide, and probably the only opportunity right now for enormous growth,'' said Bill Barney, chief executive officer of service provider Pacnet.

''We're sitting on billions of users out here in a rapidly growing environment which is... very, very extraordinary,'' he said in a forum at the CommunicAsia 2010 industry fair.

The increasing number of Asian broadband users is also fuelling greater bandwidth usage.

''If you look at the number of megabits per user, the other thing that is interesting in this region is (you're) not necessarily just getting broadband penetration, but you're also getting a multiplication effect on each user,'' Barney said.

South Koreans, who used one megabit of bandwidth less than five years ago, are using 11 megabits now, he said.

Asians, particularly Chinese, are also leading the rest of the world in broadband subscription numbers, said Robin Mersh, chief operating officer of Broadband Forum, a global consortium promoting high-speed Internet access. With 113 million broadband subscribers as of the first quarter of 2010, the China was way ahead of second-placed United States, which had 87 million, he said.

''I can't imagine really we're going to see China being knocked off this position at this point,'' said Mersh.

''Asia as a region is responsible for more than 53 percent of new broadband lines being added, and mainland China was 90 percent of that number.''