Australia's fixed broadband penetration going backwards!

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 07 December 2010 14:39

IT Industry - Development

COMMENT - Communications minister Stephen Conroy has seized on the latest broadband statistics from the OECD as a vindication of his government's plans for the National Broadband Network, saying that they show Australia falling behind in broadband penetration. But the story is not that simple.

The figures, for June 2010, reveal Australia had slipped to 18th out of 31 OECD countries for fixed-line broadband penetration, and is now one place behind New Zealand.

"This report is further evidence that Australia cannot afford to stand idly by with our aging copper network and sub-standard broadband services," Conroy said. "The latest figures'¦[are] further evidence that Australia has lacked vital investment in fixed-line broadband infrastructure.

"If Australia wants to remain competitive in our region, and as the world moves to a 21st century digital economy, we need to act now. That's why the Gillard Government is getting on with delivering the NBN."

However closer scrutiny of the figures might suggest that there is merit in what opponents of the NBN claim: that the uptake, falling cost an increasing capability of wireless mean we don't need the NBN.

What the OECD figures reveal is not so much that other countries increased their fixed broadband penetration faster than Australia's - as might have been expected - but that Australia's went backwards, by 0.86 services per 100 people in the 12 months from June 2009 to June 2010. Only five other countries achieved this dubious distinction.

So either Australia's population expanded significantly during the year, or Australians abandoned fixed broadband. Perhaps they have, because Australia was ranked eighth for wireless broadband penetration (the first time the OECD has measured this separately).

And we are, by and large up against tough competition: the Scandinavian countries (long time leaders in mobile), Korea, Japan and a couple of, perhaps, unlikely candidates: Poland and Ireland.

Under the wireless broadband umbrella the OECD lumped terrestrial wireless services, satellite services, dedicated mobile data services (ie via a dongle) and standard mobile broadband services (data included in a voice service). Previously the OECD did not include mobile broadband at all in its broadband stats.

The June 2010 figures show Australia having over 10 million services in this category: almost double the number of fixed, wired broadband services. Unfortunately the OECD has not run a comparison in which it combines countries' wired and wireless broadband service numbers and computes the results as services per 100 people. Were it to do so, Australia would be somewhere between eighth (wireless) and eighteenth (fixed) and, I suspect, ahead of where it was last year.