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Bell's Sunny Broadband Claims

By Michael Geist

Bell offers its perspective on UBB in a debate with TekSavvy in the pages of the National Post (a similar debate occurs in the Globe - Waverman vs. Beers).  The Bell response includes the claim that Canada is a broadband leader:

At the same time, Canada has increasingly become a world leader when it comes to broadband. When it comes to actual download speeds, Canada ranks third in the G20, behind only densely populated Korea and Japan. And prices are low - in fact, for higher-speed services, lower than in both the U.S. and Japan.

I'm not sure where these claims come from - Canada does not appear in the top 10 on Akamai's latest State of the Internet report for Internet speed and no Canadian city makes Akamai's top 100 for peak speed. The OECD report ranks Canada well back in terms of speed and price as does the Berkman report.  The NetIndex report ranks Canada 36th in the world for residential speed. Moreover, the shift away from the OECD to the G20 has the effect of excluding many developed countries with faster and cheaper broadband than Canada (while bringing in large, developing world economies that unsurprisingly rank below Canada on these issues). While there is probably a report somewhere that validates the claim, the consensus is that Canada is not a leader.

Full post as published by Michael Geist on February 08, 2011 (boomark / email).