As you may know from my many rants on this blog, I get quite annoyed with the various excuses eircom, the telecoms poodle and DCMNR use for explaining why we’re second last in the EU15 for broadband penetration. PC Penetration or the lack of PCs in this country is one excuse used.
An EU report (7Mb PDF) released on friday had loads of different stats on mobile usage, TV usage and Internet usage. (Pat Phelan mentions other stats from it) It was nice to finally have stats on EU wide pc penetration (see around page 30) because we can now see that excusing our poor takeup of broadband on PC penetration is flawed. Ireland has a household pc penetration rate of 44% and a broadband penetration rate of 7% (about 8% now since the report used older data). Using the logic of the excuse makers you’d expect that countries with a lower PC penetration rate would have a lower broadband penetration rate. Nope. Some yes but a lot have better rates such as:
The New Member states have an average PC penetration rate of 40% and an average broadband penetration rate of 12%.
Czech Republic: PC penetration rate of 41%, broadband penetration rate of 10%.
Poland: PC penetration rate of 41%, broadband penetration rate of 13%.
Lithuania: PC penetration rate of 36%, broadband penetration rate of 9%
Hungary: PC penetration rate of 36%, broadband penetration rate of 11%
Latvia: PC penetration rate of 35%, broadband penetration rate of 13%
Portugal: PC penetration rate of 34%, broadband penetration rate of 13%
But even those countries with a slightly better PC penetration rate have much better broadband penetration rates
Italy: PC penetration rate of 47%, broadband penetration rate of 12%
Spain: PC penetration rate of 46%, broadband penetration rate of 16%
Estonia: PC penetration rate of 45%, broadband penetration rate of 32%
Estonia has 1% more on us for PC penetration and yet has a broadband penetration rate that’s 4 times as much as us.
I look forward to knocking back your next broadband excuses guys.
I couldn’t believe myself when saw this.
I remember listening to Ireland’s embassador here and it was wonderous. I thought 20 mbit per sec would be home minimum in such advanced country. On the other hand, I have 25 at home and this alone is not yet enough to make me happy.
The correlation of % broadband penetration and pc usage is an interesting mismash of lies, damn lies… I mean statistics…
On what basis is the % BB penetration calculated per country… % of phone lines? (what about wireless then), % of citizens or % of citizens with a computer (or are we expecting Mrs. Kelly to get the broadband now while young Sean saves up for a second hand DuLL computer (must get this keyboard fixed…))? What about people with 2 computers or more (being a nerd, my household has a total of 4 at present, and some of them work!)
Also – are all the countries using the SAME BASIS FOR CALCULATION? For example, if Estonia has taken % of citizens for both stats then it seems that everyone with a PC has spanky broadband. If the PC penetration is on punters and the BB penetration is on punters with PCs then only 32% of people with PCs are using broadband…
BB Penetration as a percentage of people who can ACTUALLY use it (ie have a computer) is probably a more telling statistic. Otherwise comparisions between the penetration of Computers and the Penetration of Broadband is simply an exercise in comparing Apples (no pun) with Oranges.
What would also be an interesting statistic would be a comparision of the BB speeds available and technologies utilised – if Estonia as 25Mb, is it everywhere and is it only available on fixed line (for example).
I am in Wexford and have 2MB up and down over wireless which is fairly reliable – not a hope of getting hardwired BB anytime soon.
I have 23 computers in my house. 18 servers, 2 appliances and 3 desktops.
I was paying two thousand(yes you read that right) euro a month for a lousy 128k ISDN connection. I still can’t get DSL and I can’t afford a leased line at the moment. no wireless, cable or any other service is available. I can’t afford to work in this country.