“Broadband has changed everything,” the energetic speaker told his audience in Hong Kong. “It’s about the way we talk to our wives, to our children, our friends, our colleagues, even to our government and to our banks.

“We now buy clothes and food online and sometimes pay for our entertainment online. I get my news and all of my favorite entertainment online. I can play games for fun and I can gamble with real money. I can even meet new friends half-a-world away from my home without an introduction. This has changed everything.”

But the grizzled salesman with 20 years of experience was not making his pitch to a meeting of US-educated bankers and Silicon Valley angel investors. He was speaking to a room full of impatient Southeast Asian entrepreneurs. Men, and a few women, who less than 10 years ago barely had access to electricity, let alone to high-end telephony or broadband video.

Yet, today each of the salesman’s listeners carried a digitally driven smart device, be it a phone or a tablet, a Samsung, an iPhone or a Sony. They were all broadband enabled.

But the problem for international salesmen pitching partnerships and investments for their high-end product lines is that their audiences in much of Southeast Asia are based in countries with an average per capita GDP of less than $3,000 per year, and outside of the conference rooms the average age of half the population is under 30 years old.

In fact, the scenario above is typical of the broadband communications environment in many of the fastest growing economies in the world, especially the emerging economies. That is why developing broadband services within a fast emerging economy is a complex “sell”.

However, the picture is changing fast.

In the past, the average subscriber to a local telephone company was just making local calls and sending texts. But users are now communicating via smartphones, doing everything from trawling through Facebook to playing complex online games to watching Hollywood blockbuster movies via the global Netflix platform or even making high-value banking transfers.

Until recently such revolutionary, often interactive, services were only available via expensive packages offered by cable or satellite pay TV platforms. Today and tomorrow’s world will be wireless, say the content owners, technology providers and their bankers.

Indeed, one-way communication is quickly losing its attraction for an important slice of Asia’s fast emerging markets, those under 25 years old (at least 30 per cent of the population in many countries) who are magnetically drawn to lifestyle, leisure and entertainment content.

Until recently, in Indonesia and the Philippines for example, the telecoms market had been in a downward spiral with half-a-dozen highly competitive telecom players only competing on price, offering ever lower data packages and little else in the way of choice.

Now amid consolidation in the market new investment has been occurring, especially via the prepaid SIM card segment which accounts for maybe 95 per cent of all connections, including the delivery of video.

In Thailand, a market with 85 million mobile subscribers (and where a third of the population is under 24 years old) almost 40 per cent of mobile subscribers access the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and YouTube along with mobile music and games every day

In the meantime, content providers, such as Alexandre Mueller, the managing director of the TV5 Asia Monde television network based in Hong Kong, have been betting on the development of broadband video services of all kinds across Asia via fixed line and mobile networks.

As part of Myanmar’s astonishing breakneck race to modernity, the vast majority of all new telephones sold are smartphones that deliver not only video entertainment, essential news and sports programming, but also education, health services and government messages.

While ongoing entrepreneurial high spirits will ultimately deliver their services to millions of customers in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, it is often governments that enable such market growth with licensing and funding for the creation of locally relevant, language-specific digital content backed by training for skilled labor, at least theoretically supported by new content protection laws to combat piracy.

Finally, across much of Southeast Asia there is a wrinkle that many consumers (and some of the more enlightened regulators) tend to like: In much of the region there are relatively “light touch” content controls on the Internet (and that includes broadband).

The Internet is about giving consumers what they want.

(Simon Twiston Davies is chief executive of SimonTD & Associates Asia.)