We're quickly losing our edge in the digital world
Oct 08, 2007 04:30 AM
David Crane
The speed at which the Internet has already transformed the world is truly amazing. The World Wide Web, which made the Internet a mass participation network, wasn't even developed until the early 1990s and only began to take off in the mid-1990s.
But the Internet today is an essential part of our economy, our social networks and even our politics and media.
Crane then launches into a discussion about how important the internet is to the economy and new industry, before launching into a diatribe of doom and gloom about how far behind the pack Canada is in providing broadband access:
While about 95 per cent of South Korean households have access to high-speed broadband, and other countries are achieving high levels of broadband penetration, Canada ranks 10th in the industrial world, with only about 50 per cent of households having broadband access.
The downloading speeds for broadband in Canada are also much slower than in the leading nations. The fastest download speed offered by the largest cable operator in Canada last year was 10 megabits per second. This compares with 30 mb/s in Japan, 26 in Norway and 25 in Sweden. The fastest download speed offered by a telecommunications company was 18 mb/s in Canada, compared to 100 mb/s in Japan and Korea.
You can get a clearer idea of the numbers here (2006 figures). Like many statistics, context is important. Crane laments that in Canada, "only" 50% of households have broadband access, whereas others laud the fact that Canada has 50% compared to only 34% in the United States.
Look at the chart of broadband penetration and consider the countries that are allegedly kicking Canada's ass: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, a host of other East Asian nations that are not much bigger than a major North American city with its metropolitan area, and some of the Scandinavian countries. Is there some reason why Canada doesn't have as much broadband penetration as these countries?
Could it be that these are all small nations with a fairly consistent physical geography and generally a single, dominant ethnic or national population? Could it be because South Korea's land area is less than the island of Newfoundland? Is it really fair to compare a huge, continental nation that encompasses mountains, a cornucopia of lakes and rivers, tundra and massive forests with the likes of South Korea and Norway?
To be fair, Canada should be compared to other large continental nations with diverse geography, like the United States, Australia, mainland China, India and Brazil. And we're far ahead of all of them. Our closest competitor in this regard, the US, has some ways to go to catch up. Now there are reasons the US lags behind, both practical (the US has 10 times the population of Canada, spread out across the whole country, while the vast majority of our population is found in a handful of major urban centres) and policy (many jurisdictions in the US have a single broadband provider holding a monopoly over the area, whereas some places in South Korea have a dozen engaging in cutthroat competition to provide better services and prices). Our historical focus on communications may have also served us well here, and our federal government has actually done a good job at leading the way.
Now, I think Crane has a point, that we shouldn't be resting on our laurels. We certainly can get our broadband speeds up, and I think more competition would help: currently, most Canadian jurisdictions have only two broadband providers: the cable company and the phone company. Both of them draw their profits from other areas and might not be inclined to improve broadband services very much. A more competitive market could help.
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