Category Archives: affordability

My latest comment has been posted on Telemanagement’s Web site – What the FCC and OECD can tell us about Canada’s broadband prospects. After reading it, a colleague told me I’d buried the lead. OK, the lead is something like this:

In Canada, we’ve gloated for years about our broadband penetration numbers, while avoiding any critical talk about our abysmal performance on the most important measure of long-term success – affordability. If we don’t focus our policy efforts on what end-users can afford, and how to expand adoption and usage, we’ll never regain a leading position internationally and the Digital Consultation will fail.

Below I’ve cherrypicked a couple of observations from the Telemanagement piece (with some edits). The first is Canada’s standing on prices from the numbers updated by the OECD in May. The second is a quick piece of content analysis I did on the word “affordable.”

The OECD has organized its pricing information in 13 different datasets (all data are available on the OECD Broadband Portal). Let’s look at two of these: average broadband monthly subscription price, by country (worksheet 4e), and average broadband monthly price per advertised Mbit/s, by country (worksheet 4f):

- Average monthly subscription price: Canada ranks 23rd out of 30.
- Average monthly price per advertised Mbit/s: Canada ranks 25th out of 30. Read the rest of this entry →