What do you pay for your broadband connection?
According to a new survey, global broadband prices and speeds vary greatly. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has reported that 60% of its member countries net users are now on broadband. Several countries offer 100mbps connections (Japan, Sweden, Finland, and South Korea), and Japanese subscribers pay the lowest amount, at 22 cents per megabit per second. Interesting, countries which have moved to fiber optic networks offered the best speeds at the cheapest prices. In Japan, for instance, people could upload at the same speed they downloaded, something not possible with ADSL, or even with most cable connections. The OECD represents 30 of the leading democratic economies. "Broadband is very quickly becoming the basic medium for service delivery on both fixed and wireless networks," said the report. DSL prices have fallen around 20% in member countries and speeds increased by nearly 30%. Speeds will continue to increase as ADSL2+ is rolled out. ADSL2+ is doubles the frequency band of a typical ADSL connection over a phone line, effectively doubling the amount of data which can be sent downstream to a user, to a theoretical maximum of 24 Mbps.
