Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Australian Broadband Ranks 12th in OECD

The OECD has released annual broadband statistics to June 2007. These show broadband subscribers in OECD countries increased 24% to 18.8 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Australia is in 12 th place at at 22.7 per 100, which is an acceptable figure. The countries ahead of us are small places with bad climate, where it is easy to run broadband cable and no one wants to go outside and do anything else anyway. ;-)

The OECD noted Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and Fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) comprise 8% of broadband connections and accelerating. Japan are at 36% and Korea 31% fibre. But I wonder if the high proportion of mobile phone Internet-like users in these countries are distorting the figures by not being counted as Internet users.

There is a footnote in the report for the Australian statistics which got the media and politicians excited, which says: "DCITA estimation in absence of official ABS statistics ". This lead to speculation that the government was cooking the books to make Australia look good. However, it seems that this is just because the latest ABS statistics available were to March 2007, so DCITA had to make a projection for June.

My own estimate for Australia is 22.9 per 100 population, which is higher than the DCITA one, but within an acceptable margin of error and would not change the country rankings. I worked this out from the latest ABS statistics, which were 4.34 million non dial-up subscribers (ie broadband), or about 21.2 per 100 population in March 2007. The broadband subscribers were increasing at about 2.7% per month, so allowing for three months increase this comes out to 22.9 per 100 population.

The next Australian Bureau of Statistics ICT Reference Group meeting is on Thursday morning and I assume this will be discussed.



Broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, by technology, June 2007


DSL

Cable

Fibre/

LAN

Other

Total

Rank

Total Subscribers

Denmark

21.3

9.7

2.9

0.4

34.3

1

1 866 306

Netherlands

20.4

12.7

0.4

0.0

33.5

2

5 470 000

Switzerland*

20.5

9.3

0.0

0.9

30.7

3

2 322 577

Korea

10.1

10.6

9.2

0.0

29.9

4

14 441 687

Norway

22.7

4.5

1.8

0.7

29.8

5

1 388 047

Iceland

29.0

0.0

0.2

0.6

29.8

6

90 622

Finland

24.4

3.7

0.0

0.8

28.8

7

1 518 900

Sweden

17.9

5.6

4.6

0.4

28.6

8

2 596 000

Canada**

11.9

12.9

0.0

0.1

25.0

9

8 142 320

Belgium

14.5

9.2

0.0

0.1

23.8

10

2 512 884

United Kingdom

18.4

5.3

0.0

0.0

23.7

11

14 361 816

Australia***

18.3

3.4

0.0

0.9

22.7

12

4 700 200

France

21.4

1.1

0.0

0.0

22.5

13

14 250 000

Luxembourg**

19.8

2.4

0.0

0.0

22.2

14

105 134

United States**

9.3

11.5

0.6

0.7

22.1

15

66 213 257

Japan

10.8

2.9

7.6

0.0

21.3

16

27 152 349

Germany

20.2

1.0

0.0

0.1

21.2

17

17 472 000

Austria

11.4

6.6

0.0

0.6

18.6

18

1 543 518

Spain

13.3

3.6

0.0

0.1

17.0

19

7 483 790

New Zealand

14.6

1.1

0.0

0.8

16.5

20

683 500

Italy

15.4

0.0

0.4

0.0

15.8

21

9 307 000

Ireland

11.1

1.6

0.0

2.6

15.4

22

653 000

Portugal

9.2

5.4

0.0

0.1

14.7

23

1 555 641

Czech Republic

5.5

2.5

0.3

3.9

12.2

24

1 252 300

Hungary

6.8

4.7

0.0

0.1

11.6

25

1 170 290

Poland

5.5

2.4

0.0

0.1

8.0

26

3 040 000

Greece**

7.1

0.0

0.0

0.0

7.1

27

787 000

Slovak Republic

3.9

0.8

1.1

1.0

6.8

28

368 454

Turkey

5.1

0.0

0.0

0.0

5.2

29

3 767 912

Mexico

3.5

1.0

0.0

0.1

4.6

30

4 804 282

OECD

11.6

5.4

1.4

0.3

18.8


221 020 786


Notes: All data are supplied by member governments unless otherwise noted. Data are provided to member governments for verification before publication.
* Data is from the Swiss government and the national cable association
** OECD estimation based on company reporting
*** DCITA estimation in absence of official ABS statistics

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