Broadband penetration and damned lies

Looking over the Lesssig compilation of OECD-ITU numbers reminds us why the OECD price-per-bandwidth charts are more useful - but certainly shows precipitous falls for Germany-US-Canada amongst G7 countries, and relative rises for Japan-UK-France-Italy = the former group uses facilities-based competition, the latter supplements that with local loop unbundling.

There's not much point including smaller countries in such comparisons - the combination of scale economies for investment and geographical diversity of the G7 means that you can make somewhat meaningful comparisons. Hong Kong, Iceland and Bermuda may look good on stats, but....

For the future of such stats, I like particularly the price per bandwidth within monthly cap AND the cost per MB of additional bandwidth above the cap: see it here.