Last year, Brough Turner's remarks on Romanian fiber access and the University of Oxford Saïd Business School's Broadband Quality study prompted me into looking at Eastern European fiber access. It turns out that in addition to Romania, five other countries stand out for fiber access, namely Bulgaria, Russia, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
More recently, Yankee Group and Stratix have been working on a project for the FTTH Council to look at broadband and FTTB in Bulgaria and the socio-economic impacts it might have. The hard part is to ascertain exactly how the services delivered equate with Western European technical norms, but for simplicity's sake I will call these services FTTB for now. Did you know that 57% of Bulgarian broadband is FTTB? Admittedly, they have the lowest overall broadband penetration in Europe, but Sofia still ranks 10th in the most recent Oxford Saïd Broadband Quality city ranking.
In order to track the importance of the broadband connections and the broadband quality to the welfare of connected Bulgarians, we have had a survey up online for some weeks now. This survey will close in a few days and I wanted to give anyone reading me the opportunity to not only fill the survey for themselves but to spread the word around so that more people in Bulgaria could get an opportunity to fill this survey.
Just to be clear, the survey is in Bulgarian and open only to Bulgarian nationals living in Bulgaria. If you fit these criteria or know people who do, please spread the word around. Here is a link to a Bulgarian blog posting by ISOC luminary Veni Markovski that explains the context and links to the actual questionnaire.
