Do we need to count connections or subscriptions? I think it would be difficult to count the number of people connected per subscription.

That actually gets directly to the heart of the problem I addressed in the second installment of this series. Counting the number of subscriptions as a function of “per 100 inhabitants” becomes problematic for exactly that reason.

Due to fluctuations in household size, 100 subscriptions in the US reaches about 20% more poeple than the same 100 subscriptions in Denmark, for instance. It adversely impacts our ranking depsite having more people covered per connection.

Cheers

The heart of your question isn’t dependent on that, so we’ll move on. A number of years ago, I worked in an office in Phoenix that had about 20 people connected via one 768k DSL line. They would be counted. When I first moved to DC, I worked in an office with about 50 people connected via a T1 (again, at 1.544 m-bits). They were not counted.

The issue that creates for the OECD study is it a) reduces the number of connections counted, b) reduces the average speed of those connections, and c) discounts 50 people who are covered.

Now both of those were businesses. At the time, I had a DSL line at home as well (I now have cable . If you count both businesses and home connections, I was double counted in Phoenix and not in DC. Trying to measure broadband deployment when what you count and what you don’t is arbitrary becomes problematic.

As I mentioned in the post, some have suggested that you eliminate the counting of businesses at all and simply measure residential connections whether they are DSl, cable, Wi-Fi, T1, or anything else.

I believe a T1 line is a fiber optic line. Since all fiber lines of
256 kbit/s are counted I don’t see an issue there.

Let me sum up what I think you are saying just to be sure. Because a T1 line is subscribed to by one person only, each T1 connection is counted once. Even though in the U.S. one T1 line may connect many people to the Internet. Whereas in other countries, DSL was used, and since DSL is subscribed to one person and not used by many, the numbers are inflated for the DSL countries because there is a lesser ratio of users per connection subscriber? Where a T1 in the U.S. might allow 100 people access to the Internet, a DSL connection might allow fewer people access, thus more DSL connections are needed.

If I have understood you correctly, then we would need to adjust the OECD to include all persons that connect to the Internet per subscription. Logistically, I do not see how that is feasible. Have you any ideas?

Cheers,
Wyatt

As for the elaboration, US businesses often rely on T1 lines because that was the only option available for some time. By discounting T1 lines, but counting DSL lines, the US fares worse than countries where DSL is more prevalent for businesses. Their business connections are counted while ours are not.

So your assumption that they’re equally skewed in the US and other nations isn’t necessarily accurate. T1 lines would be discounted everywhere, but if one country was more likely to employ them, it would have a negative impact on that country, despite it having – and specifically because it has – a lot of them.

“I prefer to think that the rhetoric is aimed at providing fast, effecient, affordable broadband connectivity at a person’s home, not a special access connection location.”

That’s one area of contention where some have made the suggestion that residential connections be the focus of such studies. If you focus only on residential connections, the US is actually well ahead of many countries the current methodology inflates.