Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
12 November 2002

Yet another comparative survey on broadband takeup across Europe – this one indicates that 7% of UK users are now on broadband, compared to 17% in Spain (how humiliating to be left behind by Spain!) and 29% in Sweden. But the news is not all bad – we are catching up to Germany and Italy who are tied on 8%. Of course the low German numbers may be due to the large number of ISDN connections there – if you can get 128KBps on dialup then you might not be as keen to upgrade.

Across Europe, 26% of people said they were looking to get broadband but worryingly a quarter said they “would never” get it. And that’s a sample of people already using the Internet – if you looked at the overall population the numbers would be even more discouraging. Cost of access used to be a significant barrier, but with some broadband connections under £20 a month this is getting to be less of an excuse.

Clearly the man on the street (or even more importantly the woman on the street) needs to understand what the relevance of broadband is to them.for free adult sexaja 80 s pornoffender registry alabama sexporn amature trailersalicia sex silverstonefree amature sexsex ameteuramatuer photos sexy Map

2 Comments »

  1. Why especially “the woman on the street?”
    Broadband is being pushed in Australia too especially by Telstra. Trouble is an awful lot of people just don’t have access. Cost is another factor. There are installation fees apart from monthly access costs.

    Comment by Cherokrie James — 15 November 2002 @ 12:03 pm

  2. The UK is rather more densely populated than Australia. If even one in three of the people who could get broadband here did sign up for it things would be very different. And while “raw” cost per month is not, I think, as much of a factor any more, the fact that you generally have to commit to a year up front is indeed off-putting.

    Comment by David Brake — 15 November 2002 @ 12:46 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment