Broadband Statistics - the good, the bad and the ugly

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently released its latest batch of comparative statistics on broadband services for 30 countries.

According to the statistics, Canada ranked 10^th in terms of broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants at the end of 2008. There has been little change in Canada’s placement relative to other countries since 2005. However, that does not mean actual penetration has not increased. At the end of 2005, there were 20.7 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. Three years later, this had increased to 29.

In addition, the gap between broadband penetration in the top-ranked country and Canada’s penetration has remained quite stable, as indicated in the following chart.

Canada continues to hold the lead among the G7 countries in terms of broadband penetration. However, the United Kingdom has been catching up and is just 0.5 points below Canada.

Canada did not place as well in terms of the price of broadband service. The OECD measured the average price in each of the 30 countries and converted these to U.S. purchasing power parity for comparison purposes. According to the OECD, the average price for broadband in Canada was $45.65. At this price, Canada was 56% more expensive than in Sweden which had the lowest price, and ranked 15 places behind Sweden.

Canada appeared to fare even worse in comparison to other OECD countries in terms of the speed of broadband service offered. According to the data published by the OECD, Canada had an average download speed of 6.2 Mbps, which was 25^th out of the 30 countries. However, as reported elsewhere, there is reason to be skeptical about this ranking.

The OECD’s reported top speed for cable broadband service was 25 Mbps (as of September 2008) even though at least one cable company has been providing service with 50 Mbps download capability since early 2008.  In addition, the Observation for November 24, 2008 posted on this site reported that almost all of the large cable and telephone companies had broadband service with speeds well above the 6 Mbps average reported by the OECD.

However, as also noted in that earlier Observation, the rate of adoption of higher speed service was relatively low in Canada compared to other industrialized countries. Akamai’s most recent report on the State of the Internet for the fourth quarter of 2008 indicates that Canada ranked 13^th among 45 countries studied in terms of the percentage of broadband connections that were at speeds of at least 5 Mbps.

This is still not as strong a performance as might be expected for a country that had a relatively early start in the deployment of broadband services, but ranks Canada's performance somewhat higher than the OECD's latest statistics.