Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Some broadband stats and rankings, particularly regarding Japan

During my weekend morning routine of reviewing the past week’s events, I was reminded of a brief discussion on Japan’s placement in worldwide broadband rankings. The term “broadband” can have a few different meanings depending on the user, but a quick search pulled up some recent statistics. The OECD basically defines broadband as anything greater than 256kbps. In summary, “Japan leads the world with the fastest and lowest unit cost for broadband, according to recent data from the OECD. Japan enjoys costs per megabit per second over four times lower than that of the US.”

In particular:

• Japan led all countries with an advertised 93,693 Mbits per second speed, followed by France at 44,157 Mb/s, Korea at 43,301 Mb/s, Sweden 21,423 Mb/s, and New Zealand at 13,595 Mb/s broadband speed. [from 1st place 93Mbps to 5th place 13.5Mbps - that's quite a spread! The US isn't even in the top 10.]

• Japan led all countries surveyed in price per megabit per second at $3.09 equivalent US dollars … France followed at $3.7, Italy at 4.6, the UK at 5.3, and Korea at about $6 per Mb/sec. The US was 11th at $12.6 per Mb/second. Greece, Mexico, and Turkey topped all countries in price per megabit, with Turkey at $97.4 per megabit/second. [Turkey ... whoa!]

• The US led all countries surveyed with over 66.2 million subscribers on broadband as of June 2007 (see Figure 6). Japan had less than half the broadband subscribers of the US with 27.2 million on broadband, followed by Germany at 17.5 million, Korea at 14.4 million, and the UK at 14.4 million subscribers.

If you follow the data on the official OECD Broadband Portal site, Denmark, Netherlands, and Switzerland now lead South Korea in broadband penetration (while of those 4 nations, South Korea leads in total number of subscribers; see this chart). Historically, South Korea’s penetration rate was the highest, until 2006Q2 when it fell behind – hence the new current rankings.

South Korea may have been at the top of some key broadband figures the past couple years, but with Japan at already almost twice the subscriber-base, the fastest connections, and the best price, investing in high-bandwidth-dependent services targeting the Japanese market over the Korean doesn’t seem too shabby any more (cultural adoption issues aside, of course).

Food for strategic thought. For graphs and more check out the summary here.