OECD has been collecting stats on broadband development in member countries for a while now, and that makes them one of the most interesting resources around for this type of data. Taylor Reynolds is one of the guys in charge of that program, and he came to Amsterdam to present and comment some of their latest data, all of which is available on the OECD Broadband Portal.
The first slide that Tad presented made a huge impact on me, because it put a lot of all these debates we have about broadband in perspective: it showed the evolution of PSTN, Mobile and various broadband solutions piled up. When you see that you realise that amongst OECD countries, broadband is nothing compared to legacy PSTN, and nothing compares to mobile, the growth of which dwarfs broadband growth. A nice way to imply that there is still a long way to go...
Taylor then showed several graphs which have already been commented here and elsewhere on broadband penetration and speeds. Where things got really interesting - to me at least - is when the presentation moved towards prices. Taylor showed a great slide detailing entry level broadband offers per OECD country in % of average monthly income, and most countries (except Turkey, Mexico and the Slovak Republic) come at less than 5%, with the top 20 countries at less than 2%. So overall, broadband in its most binary expression (being online vs. not being) is affordable. Good news!
There's an interesting paradox outlined by the OECD stats, and that is that the countries where broadband is the cheapest are not necessarily those where penetration is the highest. In fact, Denmark is famous for being at the top of the OECD broadband penetration stats and unfortunately less famous for having very low average speeds and high prices. At the opposite end of the spectrum one would expect Japan to have among the highest penetrations, but it's just not so. I discussed this with Taylor on the train to Almere the day after he presented and I theorised that low prices per Mb/s made for high facial prices which may explain this paradox, but he told me that looking at entry level offer prices, this trend remains verifiable.
Taylor then outlined the OECD's recommendations for policy makers in terms of FTTx deployments and particularly recommended caution when looking at VDSL or PON FTTH since these are more complex to unbundle, and therefore may generate competition issues.
Finally, Taylor ended on a pair of slides that I find stunning, about bit caps. He said that the OECD found a trend that more countries had capped broadband offers, and perhaps more worryingly (in my opinion), more countries had only capped offers (Belgium, Canada, Australia and New Zealand I think were listed.)
Taylor has allowed me to reproduce his final slide and and I will comment on it later this week. Basically the slide shows all of the capped offers tracked by the OECD, and compares the advertised speeds with the volume of the cap to determine how fast the user would reach the cap at the maximal theoretical speed. On top of the list, there's an offer where the cap is reached in less than one minute of usage.
Do these countries even have regulators?
Anyway, it was an interesting presentation because it's good, once in a while, to go back to accurate market figures in order to put things in perspective. I have read that OECD was much criticised for publishing these stats (at least by the UK, US and Australia if I remember correctly) but I think the regulators / governments taking offence are adding stupidity to incompetence. These are facts, and while methodologies may be discussed, utlimately it should be that kind of public data that prods countries to try and improve rather than deny...
