drucker.ca

I noticed a fas­ci­nat­ing cou­ple of graphs in an arti­cle on the blog World Pol­i­tics Review, Top 30 Coun­tries for Broad­band Inter­net Access. One of them showed Japan’s astound­ing aver­age Inter­net speed:

Japan shows an impres­sive 60 megabits per sec­ond speed (I’m assum­ing this is for down­load as well as upload?) with Korea not far behind at around 45 megabits per sec­ond. I checked my broad­band speed here in Canada via SpeedTest.net and my results were a lit­tle less than 1/3 of that. I am sur­prised to see my num­ber as high as that, but then again, it’s before noon on a Saturday.

What’s also inter­est­ing is the cost of get­ting that speed. Here’s another graph:

Accord­ing to this, all that speed is incred­i­bly cheap, under a dol­lar per month per megabit in US Dol­lars, accord­ing to the arti­cle. By this cal­cu­la­tion, I’d expect that for a per­son in Tokyo to get roughly the same speed I do, they’d pay around $20 per month. Here in Van­cou­ver, my Inter­net cost is com­ing in at about $47 for that 19 Megabits, so that works out to roughly $2.5 (Cana­dian) per megabit, which would con­vert to almost exactly $2 US per month per megabit. That’s bet­ter than the graph says (although it’s hard to tell, I’d read it at closer to $5 per month).

Although I’ve been mak­ing some com­par­isons here, I’m won­der­ing how life would change for me if Inter­net was half the cost it was, and 3 times faster, but I’m also won­der­ing if this high level of ser­vice at rel­a­tively low cost will cause a flurry of Inter­net activ­ity and devel­op­ment in Japan. I note that their lim­i­ta­tions have more to do with screen size (many Japan­ese access the Inter­net exclu­sively through via cell phone screen, if  I’m not mistaken).

So, what’s it like? How has cheap, fast Broad­band Inter­net made things dif­fer­ent, and do you think it will change things in the com­ing decade? My friends in Japan, your input here is welcome!