… but I’m here in Canada, so it WAS a sloow glance.
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It doesn’t take long to go from being a leader to a laggard. That’s what has happened with Canada’s forays into high-speed broadband – the communications network that drives the Internet.
At the start of this decade, Canada was a leader in the Internet Age. Maintaining this momentum, in 2001 the National Broadband Task Force issued a challenging report, setting as a national goal the linking of all communities across Canada by 2004 through high-speed broadband of 1.5 million bits of information every second.
But too little was done to achieve this goal, and today Canada has the dubious distinction of having one of the slowest and most expensive broadband networks among advanced economies. Not only that, there is little political interest in raising Canada’s status as a high-speed information society and little understanding of why this is so damaging to Canada’s future prospects.
Canada’s broadband prices are higher than 20 other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In fact, Canadian prices are nearly 30 times as high as those in Japan, 12 times as high as in France, 11 times as high as in Sweden and just over 10 times as high as in Korea. Canada also has one of the slowest average advertised broadband speeds, ranking 15th in the OECD. Compared with Canada, Japan’s downloading speeds are nearly 12 times as fast, France’s and Korea’s nearly six times as fast and Sweden’s three times as fast.
Why does this matter?
As Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington points out, the universal provision of high-speed broadband will deliver a wide range of benefits that is, in many ways, similar to those delivered by the universal provision of electricity and the telephone in earlier generations.
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