Business
Broadband Penetration and Average Speed; East Beats West
Broadband is the necessity of the modern world. It lets you connect to the virtual world even faster, you do your job faster and it helps you save your time. High speed internet with the help of broadband has not only made the experience on internet faster but also more content and feature rich. It wouldn’t have been possible to watch a high quality video documentary on YouTube seamlessly ten years back.
In the year 1997, the cable modem was introduced. Until at least 2001, it wasn’t very common due to its high cost. By 2004, people realized the convenience of using high speed internet, it had become very common in the average households in the United States and in the rest of the world. Almost immediately after two years, broadband started gaining popularity in developing countries like India as well with state run BSNL and MTNL using their existing landlines to provide high speed internet up to 256Kbps.
Since 2004, broadband has come a long way. In terms of speed and cost, many developing countries are leaving the developed countries like UK and US in the dust. To cite an example, according to a survey done by an IT company Akamai, the average broadband speed in UK is 6.3Mbps compared to 6.4Mbps in Romania. Among the G20 nations, the UK generates the largest amount of money online, still the speed of download in the country is 16th slowest in Europe.
When I was in UK, I owned a BT broadband connection. The connection was lightning fast at 16Mbps, much faster than the average UK broadband speed. The connection cost me £16 for unlimited broadband excluding the line rental of £15.45 per month. I got extra benefits like Sainsbury’s gift card worth £25, weekend calls and free sports channels on TV.
When I came to India I did not expect similar speed on broadband and at much cheaper price! In Bangalore 16Mbps Airtel connection cost me ₹1500 (£16.6) including line rental and a free Wi-Fi router and 20 hours of free calls per month. You do not need to hang-up every hour like you need to do for unlimited and weekend calls in the UK. The internet connection did not include TV, which was one disadvantage. The service providers do offer Direct to home satellite TV services, but they have not merged their services to provide a complete package. Also the download had a limit of 80GB but after that you can download unlimited at the lower speed of 512Kbps, I could never consume 80GB hence I experienced seamless fast internet without any problem throughout the month.
BT Group of the UK, which has a network reaching almost every household in the country, is laying fibre to cabinets in the streets. However, they are still relying on conventional copper wires to carry the broadband signal to the doorstep from the streets. This means that if 1,000Mbps or more is supported by the fibre optics, at the end of the day the copper wires to home will only be able to carry 80Mbps speed.
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Image by Akamai |
When it comes to the network speed, east clearly beats the west. The tech savvy Asian population in South Korea (15.7Mbps), Japan (10.9Mbps) and Hong Kong (9.3Mbps) have occupied the top three positions in the list of fastest average internet speed by country.
Rank
|
Country
|
Fixed Broadband Subscriptions
|
Percentage of Population
|
Year
|
1
|
China
|
126,337,000
|
9.42
|
2010
|
2
|
United States
|
85,723,155
|
27.62
|
2010
|
3
|
Japan
|
34,044,729
|
26.91
|
2010
|
4
|
Germany
|
26,089,800
|
31.70
|
2010
|
5
|
France
|
21,345,000
|
34.00
|
2010
|
6
|
United Kingdom
|
19,579,823
|
31.56
|
2010
|
7
|
South Korea
|
17,193,570
|
35.68
|
2010
|
8
|
Russia
|
15,700,000
|
10.98
|
2010
|
9
|
India
|
15,010,000
|
1.23
|
2013
|
10
|
Brazil
|
13,266,310
|
6.81
|
2010
|
When it comes to number of subscription, BRIC nations manage to come at the top 10 positions challenging the developed countries. China sits at the top, and Russia, India and Brazil occupy the 8th, 9th and 10th position respectively.
However, when it comes to rate of broadband penetration, BRIC nations do really badly, especially India, the Information Technology hub of the world, with only 1.23% of its population connected to the high speed internet. Russia is doing relatively better than other BRIC nations with 10.98%.
Many governments in Asia have made Internet development as a national goal on priority, which has resulted South Korea becoming the hub of online streaming and online gaming which requires high bandwidth. Just like how in Europe Latvia and Romania do wonders, we may expect India and China doing the same in Asia, which have massive population working in Information Technology services and Software Development.
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