Broadband report 2008: Korea still leads
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a major new report, showing how the US and other countries compare in terms of broadband access, speed, and price. The rankings (PDF) place the US 15th, this country having fallen every year since 2001. Here’s the full report (PDF). According to the report’s executive summary:
“The US broadband policy environment is characterized on the one hand by market fundamentalists who see little or no role for government, and see government as the problem; and on the other by digital populists who favor a vastly expanded role for government (including government ownership of networks and strict and comprehensive regulation, including mandatory unbundling of incumbent networks and strict net neutrality regulations) and who see big corporations providing broadband as a problem. Given the policy advocacy and advice they are getting, it is no wonder that Congress and the Administration have done so little.”
The executive summary and more findings are available at the website of ITIF, as well as the table with final Ranking and Full Report (both in PDF format).
Source: Neowin
Comments(45)
Asians rule! LOL
#1 Indeed they do, 0.93 subscribers per household is quite impressive.
But I also noticed in the top 9 there are 5 scandinavian contries, good work there too.
Asians also rule in dialup per household ^^
great..my country not even listed!
…o…m…g… we finally beat Sweden in something! wippiii! WTG finland ^^
Korea has .93 per household OMG! Online gaming and porn addicts!
I looked at the ranking 10 times now… is this f*cking seriuos ? I mean like.. 0,13USD for 1Mbps in Japan… dude, I feel like a total idiot to pay 15-20USD monthly for the same amount of internet :S
..or did I messed up with my calculations somewhere ?
No, you got it right Japan also has freakishly high upload speeds
Toffe how can 5 scandinavian countries be at top 9 when there are only 3?
Finland åland etcetc are nordic.
gaming freaks , allofem
@5 YEAH Finland FTW!!!! didn’t see that comin
That’s right AMERICA, SUCK ON THAT!
Asians are teh leet haxorz in the netz!!!
USA SUCKS ASS!
So much for American technological supremacy, MEH MEH MEH!
This doesnt measure the quality of the internet tho, i mean you may have a 100Mb line, but if it got a quality of a roller coaster, that good does it do?
@5,11 Noes, ah well we still beat you in everything else <3
Yep. I just pay about 10$ monthly for high-speed unlim. I’m satisfied. I think it has to do with all the Koreans carrying MP3 players around. I suspect that they buy everything from the NET.
Wow New Zealand isn’t last
Our internet is so s!%t though!
Hate Adobe Acrobat? Me too.
Results:
1 South Korea
2 Japan
3 Finland
4 Netherlands
5 France
6 Sweden
7 Denmark
8 Iceland
9 Norway
10 Switzerland
11 Canada
12 Australia
13 United Kingdom
14 Luxembourg
15 United States
16 Germany
17 Belgium
18 Portugal
19 New Zealand
20 Spain
21 Italy
22 Austria
23 Ireland
24 Greece
25 Hungary
26 Poland
27 Czech Republic
28 Slovak Republic
29 Turkey
30 Mexico
@9 “1″,
back to school. Not only for “only 3 scandinavian countries” part, but for åland, too! It’s not a country, but a part of Finland…
Germany sucks aswell
I pity any country that came below the UK #13. Our broadband speeds are sh*t thanks to the ususual MegaCorp tactics. Here you pay for a theoretical maximum speed and your ISP can supply you with anything it wants. For instance I pay 50 GBP (50 US$)for a 20Mbs connection but never get more than 10Mbs. Maybe the results are skewed by stuff like University connections to net cos they’re mentally fast.
These figures are complete BS. As an Australian I know for a fact our access, speed, and price are much much worse than the US.
The monopolist company controlling over 1/2 the market charges $75 US a month for a 1.5 megabit connection which limits uploads and downloads to 25GB before being slowed to dial up speeds. If you are on the wrong plan you can get charged thousands for downloading a few more GBs of data. Theoretically we can get 24 megabit connctions but only if you happen to live next door to an ADSL2 enabled exchange with perfect line quality, and this costs much more.
@22
As an Aussie myself I agree with you completely. Australia has the worse broadband and it’s not even cheap.
good thing portugal is actually listed there. but damn, japan has some crazy download speeds.
Thats crap false results i live in greece and the avarage speed in braodband is around 16-19mbit.I have a 19 mbit and my download is 1.9-2 mb/sec. And most of the users here are at those rates, and is really fast to download a dvd in a few minutes.
@22 & 23 agreed. i don’t think that list properly shows how rubbish our internet is. The only reason we made it in the top 30 is the penetration percent. Only 20% of household actually have broadband, the rest are still on dialup
i can’t speak for korea but i would suppose that the situation is somewhat similar there too. even though width of the broadband here in japan is very high (i myself have 100/30 Mb) since almost all servers i connect too, it still takes a lot of time. for instance a game server in the states has on a good day 150 ms while a server in europe has 250-300 ms. downloading through torrents is rarely done with speeds higher than 100 kB/s. it is of course different against servers inside japan, 5-6 MB/s (pls notice the capital B).
i had 8/1 Mb in europe a couple of years ago and that was a lot faster than anything i get now. ergo, location is more important than theoretical speed.
@DegJ: Well we actually get a better quality service as well as much higher bandwith.
With 100 Mbit/s up and down I get around 90 Mbit/s or more at all times completely unlimited. Peering is great to other countries too and since it’s fiber it’s cheap as well. 
The US really needs to build a fiber network through all major cities.
@Parakratos: Well, you can’t really measure like that.
If I did the same Sweden would have a much higher average. You have to consider all old people etc. who don’t want to pay for faster connections. They are often a bigger part than you think. I agree with you though that the average values seems low if you go on people you know. 
I have 100Mb Optic fiber internet connection.. gotta love those University/student-housing networks in Holland.
@ blimp.
“ergo” ???
Well f**k me if it ain’t the architect from the matrix.
@volker
ergo is latin for therefore.
don’t do drugs and stay in school!
Owned. Who the hell doesn’t know what ergo means?
Ah, it only ranks OECD countries. I wondered if they’d drawn the 30 to rank randomly, as some obvious heavy-hitters are missing.
I know what it means ya spastics.
Watch the matrix series again and you might get the joke.
For f**ks sakes.
Are you sure this ain’t the list of countries with highest suicide-rate?
; )
I mean really…
You no sense of humour having bastards (must live in middle america or woolongong).
Lick and tongue around my balls and ass.
If you looking for accurate ranking try http://speedtest.net/global.php
have fun
I’m in Korea… I pay $32, insanely fast speeds, and NO upload or download limits! But if you have a problem and call your ISP’s ENGLISH phone number they just giggle and hang up. Over and over and over again…
just realized that canada is one of the most overcharged countries for broadband !
what this fails to mention sure canada has 7.6 or what ever (beats usa) but the bw is limited to like 50gb a month heh
Not only is Canada overcharged, they also have network neutrality issues.
That “report” if you can call it that is totally BS. I’m a finnish guy and I can say for a total certainty that the Average download speed is nowhere near 21.7 Mbps as the report says. Vast majority of the connections are ADSL under 8Mbps so there is no way the average is that high. The real figure is probably somewhere around NL and Denmark.
#9 QUOTE “Scandinavia is a historical and geographical region centred on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe which includes the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The other Nordic countries, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, are sometimes included because of their close historic and cultural connections to Denmark, Norway and Sweden”
quote from wikipedia…
Out of curiosity, why are these “reports” — as invariably misleading, laughably inaccurate, and pointless as they are — news? Does anyone give a flying rat poop?
Seriously, if you think a report like this has any validity or if said report makes you feel better about yourself or your country of residence, seek help.
In Ireland i pay 55 euro a month for a 2mb connection.
thats 85 dollars!!
Irelands the most expensive country in the world because it limits most connections to 10-15gigs/month. and only a maxium speed of 2mb. That report is wrong.
Im moving to Korea! or Holland
These results are extremely misleading. They fail to take into account download/upload quotas and the costs/reduced speeds incurred when these quotas are passed. For example, the “cheapest” 24/1mbit plan in Australia may be only $20 per month, but that would come with a monthly quota of less than 3GB. At that speed, you can reach the quota in less than 20 minutes, and then you’re stuck with 64k/64k for the rest of the month. Other ISPs will charge $0.15 per MB over instead of reducing the speed…