So it was disappointing news when researchers from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and at the University of Oviedo published their most recent Broadband Quality Score. The report, sponsored by Cisco, found that Canada ranked 30th among the countries surveyed, a drop from last year’s already lowly 26th spot. Moreover, among 100 cities surveyed, Vancouver ranked 46th, Montreal 69th, Ottawa 81st and Toronto 82nd in broadband quality.
Broadband speed and bandwidth matter. Without a leading-edge broadband infrastructure Canadian entrepreneurs and innovators are less likely to develop leading-edge applications, which will put us at a disadvantage in global competition, while Canadian users will have less ability to exploit the potential of high-speed broadband.
High-speed broadband is critical not just for business users. If we want to deploy telemedicine so that high-quality health care can be delivered to rural or remote communities or take education, including distance education, to a higher level, then high-speed broadband is essential.
The research team that produced the report "found that broadband quality is linked to social and economic benefits, and that countries with high broadband quality have broadband on their national agenda."
The top three countries are Korea, Sweden and Japan, and they are way ahead of the others with infrastructure already in place to meet the next-generation Internet applications that will soon be here. In all three countries, high-speed broadband is a national strategy.
As a report last year from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington found, leadership matters. "Overall, at the broadest level nations with robust national broadband strategies — that is, those that make broadband a priority, co-ordinate across agencies, put real resources behind the strategy, and promote both supply and demand — fare better than those without," it said.
Interestingly, the top three countries in the Cisco report are also the three countries highlighted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in its report. Sweden provided generous subsidies to ensure that high-speed broadband was available throughout the country. In Japan, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori appointed the Information Technology Strategy Council, which developed a strategy to make Japan the world leader in information technology by 2005.
But Korea stands out even more. In 1987 it adopted the Framework Act on Informization Promotion, which led to the establishment of the National Information Society Agency, with a mandate to supervise the construction of high-speed networks, promote the use of information and communications technologies within government and promote public access to broadband and digital literacy.
Korea now has a national optical fibre network and has strongly promoted e-government, e-health and e-education. It has also provided incentives for the private sector to develop new technologies and new applications.
While successive governments in Canada have engaged in e-talk, no government to date has provided the leadership and resources to really make Canada a global leader in the Internet age.
The Cisco report awarded rankings based on a combination of download speeds, upload speeds and what it called latency, which means the time it takes a packet of data to go from source to destination. A Broadband Quality Score of 30 was considered the minimum needed to meet the needs of today’s applications. Canada scored 31 BQS points.
The coming Internet applications over the next three to five years will require broadband that scores at least 50 BQS points. Japan, Korea and Sweden are already above this level. But Canada may be moving too slowly to meet the challenges of the next-generation Internet.
It is not just a lack of political leadership. There has been little leadership from industry as well. As a result Canada has one of the slowest yet most expensive broadband networks among the advanced countries, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation documents on a regular basis.
With high-speed broadband the essential infrastructure for a successful 21st century economy, we have no time to waste.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): David Crane
Quelle/Source: The Chronicle Herald, 11.10.2009
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