In Saturday’s The Globe and Mail there was a very interesting and informative essay arguing why Canada is doing much better in the broadband race than the OECD claims. Some of the article’s main points are:
- Residential broadband subscriptions, however, are taken at the household level, not at the individual level. This means the OECD ranks broadband penetration based on the number of houses and businesses that have Internet connections, and does not take into account the number of people working or living at the location.
- We see comparisons of advertised speeds and “price per advertised megabit,” which are especially misleading. In Europe, advertised Internet speeds are higher than in North America. However, a study done by content provider Akamai indicates that true speeds are slower than North America. Akamai Technologies reports that the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, against 3.2 Mbps for France, whereas the OECD finds that the average advertised speed from French ISPs was a staggering 51 Mbps
- Countries like France may have 52 Mbps fibre connections, but the adoption rate is not more than 25 percent. Canada is in the process of rolling out high speed fibre networks, and the adoption rate is expected to by much higher.
The article does fail to mention anything about broadband costs in Canada compared to other countries, as one blogger points out, in Japan 14-16Mbps can cost $5 per month, where as Canada your looking at $50 plus. Also, The Globe and Mail is owned by CTVGlobeMedia, which is in turn owned by Bell Canada Enterprises.
Update: BCE only owns 15% of CTVGlobeMedia.
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