The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reports that in 19 of the world’s poorest countries the cost of acquiring broadband access exceeds typical monthly incomes.
The 100-page publication, titled “The State of Broadband 2012: Achieving Digital Inclusion for All,” presents a country-by-country assessment of global broadband deployment and highlights where progress has stalled.
The report emphasizes persistent affordability gaps. In 40 developed economies, the price of fixed broadband was under 2% of average monthly income last year, while many developing nations face much higher relative costs.
To address this imbalance, the ITU has set a target: by 2015, fixed broadband should cost less than 5% of average monthly income in developing countries.
Policy adoption is expanding—119 countries now have a national broadband plan, policy or strategy—but the ITU stresses that having a plan alone is not enough to achieve its goal of universal broadband by 2015.
Ranking fixed broadband penetration produced expected results among smaller advanced economies: Liechtenstein and Monaco top the list, reflecting their small populations and high levels of development.
South Korea, Denmark and Iceland were among the few countries to rank in the top 10 for both fixed and mobile broadband penetration. The United Kingdom placed 12th for fixed broadband and 9th for mobile broadband, while the United States ranked 18th for fixed and 8th for mobile.
Many countries, particularly in Africa, remain far behind in fixed broadband subscriptions: 25 nations did not register any measurable fixed subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. On the mobile side, 45 countries showed no measurable mobile broadband subscriptions.
The report notes that rapid growth in mobile broadband and smartphone adoption is encouraging but cautions against complacency.
It points out that increasing multi-device ownership means the number of mobile cellular subscriptions now substantially exceeds the number of unique mobile users. The ITU also forecasts that by 2020 the number of connected devices could be six times the number of connected people.
Another notable finding concerns the future linguistic composition of the internet. While English remains the most widely used language online, Chinese is close behind—English content reaches approximately 565 million users while Chinese content reaches about 510 million.
The ITU suggests that Chinese could overtake English as the leading internet language by 2015 if current trends continue.
These findings raise two central questions: are these trends surprising, and can the ITU’s affordability and universal access targets realistically be met?