Global broadband speeds soar

Global broadband speeds have increased by an average of more than 1Mbps over the past two years, while prices have fallen sharply.

The latest Internet Telecommunications Union (ITU) 'digital.life' report noted that the median speed has risen from 256Kbps to 1.4Mbps since its last survey 22 months ago. Meanwhile, the last 10 months have seen prices halved, although there remain huge differences in the cost of broadband in different countries.

In the UK, the price has fallen by just over 50 per cent, bringing the cost per 100Kbps index down to 0.63. That is more expensive than Germany (0.52), the US (0.49), France (0.36) and, but even they look expensive compared to the Netherlands (0.14), South Korea (0.08) and, cheapest of all, Japan (0.07). However, before anyone shouts 'rip off Britain' it should be noted that it has no state subsidy for broadband services, which is not necessarily true of other countries.

Of those mentioned above, only Germany and the US offer a slower speed than the UK's 8Mbps; in Japan and Korea the norm is 51.2Mbps. A small number of UK ISPs do offer ADSL2+ services up to 22Mbps and that will increase as BT rolls out its 21st Century Network.

In the interim, UK Net users should be consoled by the fact that they do not live in Australia, Mexico, Spain or Turkey, where the relative per-100Kbps costs are 3.45, 6.25, 4.84 and 10.52 respectively.

Source: pcpro.co.uk