The results of the second annual global study on the quality of broadband connections done at end of 2009 reveal that 62 out of the 66 countries analyzed had improved the quality of consumer broadband services since last year. However, new data from the study highlights the extent of the
digital quality divide between urban and rural areas and, for the first time, compares the quality of fixed and mobile broadband services.
The first groundbreaking
Broadband Quality Study was published in September 2008 to highlight each country’s ability to benefit from next-generation web applications and services. The research team found that broadband quality is linked to a nation’s advancement as a knowledge economy and countries with broadband on their national agenda had the highest broadband quality. This year’s report covers an additional 24 countries and includes new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities.
Highlights / Key Facts:
- Overall average broadband quality increased across the globe:
- Global average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Megabits per second (Mbps)
- Global average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps
- Global average latency decreased by 21% to 170 milliseconds
- South Korea tops the 2009 Broadband Leadership table.
| | | Broadband Penetration (% of households) | Broadband Quality Score 2009 | Broadband Leadership 2009 |
| 1 | South Korea | 97% | 66 | 139 |
| 2 | Japan | 64% | 64 | 115 |
| 3 | Hong Kong | 99% | 33 | 111 |
| 4 | Sweden | 69% | 57 | 110 |
| 5 | Switzerland | 90% | 40 | 108 |
| 6 | Netherlands | 83% | 46 | 108 |
| 7 | Singapore | 96% | 32 | 107 |
| 8 | Luxembourg | 99% | 27 | 107 |
| 9 | Denmark | 82% | 45 | 106 |
| 10 | Norway | 84% | 38 | 102 |
- South Korea rose just above last year’s broadband quality leader Japan with a 72% improvement in its Broadband Quality Score (BQS). This improvement has been driven by continuous efforts by the government to strengthen the country’s position as one of the world’s ICT leaders. Combined with higher broadband penetration, South Korea rises above Japan in the global Broadband Leadership rankings.
- Japan stands out as having the cities with the highest BQS in the world, with Yokohama and Nagoya leading the BQS rankings and Sapporo not far behind.
- Sweden has the highest quality broadband internet in Europe. It is rapidly catching up with Japan and South Korea as its BQS improves 38% from 2008. Sweden is the most successful country in closing the broadband quality gap with residents outside the most populated cities enjoying better quality than those in the cities.
- Lithuania, Bulgaria and Latvia come just behind Sweden in quality boosted by recent city-based fibre rollouts and cable improvements but low broadband penetration means these countries have yet to break into the broadband leaders’ category.
- 39 countries have a BQS above the threshold required to deliver a consistent quality of experience for the most common web applications today, such as social networking, streaming low-definition video, web communications and sharing small files such as photos and music.
- Nine countries, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia, The Netherlands, Denmark and Romania, were found to have the broadband quality required for future web applications, such as high definition Internet TV viewing and high-quality video communications (such as home telepresence) that will become mainstream in the next 3 to 5 years. In 2008, only Japan exceeded this threshold.
- The research compares countries according to their stage of economic development :
- Amongst the developed, innovation-driven economies, South Korea achieved the greatest improvement in broadband quality over the past year with a 73% increase in BQS. Sweden, the USA and the Czech Republic also saw significant above average improvements.
- Amongst efficiency-driven economies, Bulgaria topped the most improved list with a 57% increase in BQS from 2009. Lithuania, Romania and Latvia also achieved above average improvements.
- Amongst factor-driven economies, Kenya actually trebled its BQS but the overall score for Kenya remains well below the threshold required for today’s applications. Vietnam and Qatar followed Kenya as having made the most progress in broadband quality for countries in this stage of economic development.
- The cities with the highest BQS of all the countries in the study were:
| Top 10 Cities | BQS | Next 10 Cities | BQS |
| Yokohama, Japan | 85 | Rotterdam, The Netherlands | 55 |
| Nagoya, Japan | 82 | Riga, Latvia | 54 |
| Kaunas, Lithuania | 79 | Copenhagen, Denmark | 53 |
| Sapporo, Japan | 72 | Bucharest, Romania | 52 |
| Seoul, South Korea | 68 | Stockholm, Sweden | 51 |
| Malmo, Sweden | 67 | Vilnius, Lithuania | 50 |
| Osaka, Japan | 65 | Zurich, Switzerland | 49 |
| Wuhan, China | 60 | Tokyo, Japan | 49 |
| Uppsala, Sweden | 57 | Goteborg, Sweden | 49 |
| Sofia, Bulgaria | 56 | Kosice, Slovakia | 48 |
- The research team compared the difference between the BQS in the most populated cities with the BQS in the rest of the country. Although a digital quality divide was found in the majority of countries, 13 countries showed significant differences in BQS between its major cities and the rest of the country. Lithuania, Russia and Latvia had the biggest digital quality divide, while rural residents in Sweden, United Arab Emirates and Iceland enjoyed similar, if not slightly higher quality broadband services than their city counterparts.
- The country with the highest broadband quality outside of its major cities was Japan, followed by Korea and Sweden.
- The study also included data on the quality of mobile broadband services for the first time. On average, mobile devices connecting to WiFi services meet the broadband quality threshold required for today’s mobile Internet applications. The average BQS of 3G and 3G+ technologies do not currently meet the threshold due to low upload throughput.
A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection. Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed. But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection. People in India still struggling to get 256k connection.
Internet connections are fastest in South Korea
People in the United States basically invented the Internet. So U.S. connections must be the fastest and cheapest in the world, right?
Not so much.
Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are
only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai.
And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too.
The slower connection here in the U.S. costs about $45.50 per month on average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In South Korea, the much-faster hookup costs $17 per month less. An average broadband bill there runs about $28.50.
So why is U.S. Internet so much slower and pricier than broadband connections in South Korea? The question is timely, as the
U.S. government pushes forward with a "broadband plan" that aims to speed up connections, reduce costs and increase access to the Internet, especially in rural areas.
Map: U.S. Internet is slower than Slovakia's?
The comparison between South Korea and the United States is not perfectly instructive, especially since "we probably won't ever be South Korea," said
Robert Faris, research director at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
"The whole political and social climate is so different, the geography is different, the history is so different," he said. "It's all pretty different."
With those caveats in mind, here are the five potential reasons U.S. Internet speeds are slower and more expensive than those in South Korea. This list was gleaned from interviews with broadband experts and from policy papers:
Korean competition
Countries with fast, cheap Internet connections tend to have more competition.
In the U.S., competition among companies that provide broadband connections is relatively slim. Most people choose between a cable company and a telephone company when they sign up for Internet service.
In other countries, including South Korea, the choices are more varied.
While there isn't good data on how many broadband carriers the average consumer has access to, "I think we can infer that South Korea has more [competition in broadband] than the United States," Faris said. "In fact, most countries have more than the United States."
Some academics, including Yochai Benkler, co-director of the
Berkman Center, have criticized the U.S. government's broadband plan as not doing enough to create the kind of competition that is present in other countries.
In a New York Times editorial,
Benkler says competition will reduce costs for broadband consumers.
"Without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world," he writes.
Culture and politics
There are stark cultural differences between hyper-connected Korea, where more than 94 percent of people have high-speed connections, according to the OECD, and the United States, where
only about 65 percent of people are plugged into broadband, according to an FCC survey.
The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people.
One program, for example, hooked up housewives with broadband and taught them how to make use of the Web in their everyday lives.
Parents in Korea, who tend to place high value on education, see such connections as necessities for their children's educations, said Rob Atkinson, president of the
Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
These cultural differences mean Korea has a more insatiable demand for fast Internet connections, he said. That demand, in turn, encourages telecommunications companies to provide those connections.
Faris, of the Berkman Center, said no one society has a stronger appetite for Internet connectivity than another. Korea's government simply has whetted that appetite, and provided the incentives to make high-speed connections accessible to a large segment of society.
Political culture has more to do with it, he said.
"The United States is a more litigious culture than others, and the power of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to regulate is not as strong here as it is in other countries," which means its less likely that the U.S. will pass policies to promote the growth of ultra-fast broadband.
Open versus closed networks
There is vigorous debate in the telecommunications world about the role "open networks" have in creating fast, cheap Internet connections.
The idea behind an "open" system is essentially that, for a fee, broadband providers must share the cables that carry Internet signals into people's homes.
Companies that build those lines typically oppose this sharing. A number of governments, including South Korea and Japan and several European countries, have experimented with or embraced infrastructure-sharing as a way to get new companies to compete in the broadband market.
The U.S. does not require broadband providers to share their lines, and some experts cite Korea's relative openness as one reason the Internet there is so much faster and cheaper than it is here.
The most important thing is that countries create a way for companies to enter the broadband market without having to pay for huge amounts of infrastructure, said Faris.
Population density
South Korea, with more than 1,200 people per square mile, is a lot denser than the United States, where 88 people live in the same amount of space, and where rural areas and suburbs are large.
The result for broadband? It costs less to set up Internet infrastructure in a tightly populated place filled with high-rise-apartments, such as South Korea, than it does in the United States, where rural homes can be great distances apart.
In both countries, copper wires tend to carry broadband signals from fiber optic cables and into the home. Data can travel fast on copper wire, but it slows down the farther it goes.
In South Korea, that's usually just from the base of an apartment building to a particular unit. In the U.S., copper wire may have to link a home with a fiber optic cable that's a mile away.
Korea had a plan ... a decade ago
In the 1990s, South Korea set a priority that it would be a highly connected country with a high degree of Internet literacy.
"They made this a priority 10 years ago and they've really executed on it," said Atkinson, from ITIF, the Internet policy think tank.
The country is still four to five years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to broadband policy, even as the United States tries to catch up, said Taylor Reynolds, an economist at OECD.
"Korea has long been a leader in broadband and in very fast broadband," he said. "And, in fact, the technology that Korea has used for probably the past four to five years is VDSL, and that's a technology that's now being put in by AT&T" in the United States.
Meanwhile, Korea is abandoning that technology in favor of the next big thing, Reynolds said. That likely involves bringing super-fast fiber optic cables straight into homes. And, according to a recent report by the Berkman Center, that could make South Korean Internet 10 times faster than it is now.
Faris said Korea's clear-cut plan helped lead to its faster broadband speeds.
"A big difference is that Korea made a decisive move to expand Internet in the country," he said. "They said we want to be very good at connecting to the Internet. A lot of government money was thrown at it ...
"The U.S. has taken a fairly hands-off approach to the sector. They've left it to the private sector. There's been some money put into it, but not that much, on a per capita basis. We just haven't taken it that seriously."
