Broadband expectations and the convergence of ranks

Abstract

Broadband Internet service to widely held to be a significant contributor to economic development and global competitiveness, and comparison of adoption rates across countries are common. This paper presents evidence that the relative broadband Internet adoption ranks across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (“OECD”) countries are converging to the wireline telephone adoption ranks in the mid 1990s. This was a time when wireline telephone service had reached maturity, but before consumers began to abandon traditional telephone services for mobile services and Internet telephone technologies. As such, in the absence of better data on household adoption, wireline telephone rank is a useful proxy for a country's ultimate fixed-line broadband penetration rank. Having such an educated guess available regarding broadband rank should reduce the amount of anxiety over rankings, since similar rankings across the two services implies suitable broadband performance. Large departures, alternately, may be a cause for concern or delight. Like prior analyses, the findings suggest that the adoption of communications services is largely an economic and demographic issue.