Broadband Costs Abroad, Part 2

In an earlier post I had some stats on broadband costs in various countries around the world. It was obvious that Mexico, Turkey, and Greece are not the best places to get an apartment and set up broadband access. The current issue of Wired magazine (with Halo 3 on the cover) has a great “Infoporn” spread that represents costs in different colors on a world map. Unfortunately, it’s not online and may never be – despite being all about the implications of technology, most of the magazine’s print articles never find a digital future.

Here are some more choice numbers though to show that when it comes to tech, the first world is usually cheaper than the third world. Not only is broadband cheaper in dollar terms, but it’s also a smaller percentage of the average person’s budget. As expected, capitalist countries with telecom competition end up producing cheaper costs for consumers. Japan, Korea, western Europe, and the U.S. are the best places to get bandwidth for a reasonable cost. The worst? Well, let’s just say here’s another reason to call Africa “the dark continent.”

– The average American with broadband pays o.o1 of their monthly salary for high-speed access. The average Japanese person pays 0.002 percent of their monthly salary .

– On average Bolivian wages, a person would need to spend half the average monthly salary to get online at high speed. Nicaraguans would pay a fifth of their monthly salary, which is probably why there are only 6,600 high-speed customers in the whole country. (How many of those are Internet cafes or tourist hotels I wonder?)

– It gets worse. Saudis, rich as they are, pay a staggering price for access: 58 percent of the average monthly salary. Only 0.1 percent of the population has a connection. Pakistanis would pay twice the average salary. In Mozambique, high-speed access is all but a dream. Access would cost 1,400 times the average monthly wage. Apart from a few spots here and there (namely Egypt and Morocco), Africa is off the World Wide Web in terms of the overall population.