Ireland almost the most expensive place for broadband
Irish broadband users look like they are doing very poorly in terms of value for money broadband connections compared to many other countries in the world. Ireland Offline has done some research into basic broadband connections in thirty countries and found that Ireland was at position 27, only beaten by Luxembourg, Denmark and Iceland. The United Kingdom seems to fair very well in the table with a position of number six. The full press release and original table can be found here.
The pricing data also shows the wide variation in what are the basic services available around the world. Perhaps a better way to see the value for money is to work out the price per kbps for each service, we have done this and added this ranking position to our copy of the original data below. In our table we have added the download speed and upload speeds together to work out the price per kbps. It should be noted the original data from IrelandOffline has the UK down as 128kbps for its entry level upstream, the vast majority of 512kbps services actually have a 256kbps upstream, which is what we have used in our calculation.
|
(*) Update 22nd March 2005 - The Canadian entry was calculated on the wrong upstream speed, apparently 384kbps is the more common upstream speed. This means the price per kbps changes from 0.45 to 0.8 cents, with Canada remaining in fifth place.
Ranking according to the price per kbps is quite interesting, as it perhaps reveals more about how mature the broadband market is in the various countries. France was until its LLU market exploded not a very exciting place broadband wise, but the last year or so have seen massive changes. The UK is experiencing this but at what seems a slower pace and without the cut-throat competition. If the various upgrades going on now in the UK are seen through to completion we should by the end of 2005 see 1Mbps as the basic connection speed, with perhaps 40% of broadband households enjoying speeds in excess of 4Mbps.
