The ITU has released its latest report on the state of the information society around the world [pdf, 4.28MB].
There is a lot of information in there to be digested, but for now, let me highlight a couple observations.
The first point that I found interesting was a table in Annex 3, that is the basis for computing the IDI – defined as the ICT Development Index. In passing, allow me to applaud the ITU for its use of a SRT: a Secondary Recursive TLA: a rarely used three letter acronym that embeds a second TLA within it.
In that Annex 3 table, we can see that in 2008, Canada had computers in 80% of our households and broadband in 75.1% of the households. Assuming that households with computers would be the only ones that would subscribe to broadband service, it appears that close to 94% of Canadian households with computers had broadband service. As a comparison, Sweden has 87% of households equipped with computers, 84% with broadband. It seems to me that ensuring computer accessibility, through increased digital literacy and affordability, is one of the things that needs to be looked at when we try to increase broadband penetration.
Section 2 of the report has a couple important text boxes that speak about the challenges of international data comparisons. Box 2.1 talks about the importance of shifting to household survey data, using mobile penetration as an example of the distortions created by use of supply side data from operators.
Box 2.3 looks at specific limitations of international data comparisons, looking at the Korean and Japanese cases as examples.
‘International Internet bandwidth per user’ is another indicator where the performance of the Republic of Korea is relatively weak (ranked 58th globally). International bandwidth is low since Korean Internet users rely mainly on national bandwidth, available abundantly and at relatively low cost. Koreans have produced a large amount of national Internet content in local language and surf ‘at home’ (on web sites that are hosted within the country, not abroad), in their local language. The top twenty most popular Korean websites are all hosted in Korea. Few Koreans visit websites abroad due to language constraints.
The box doesn’t mention the anomaly for Korea with computer penetration (80.9%), yet 94.3% of households are reported as having broadband. Interesting?
Canada’s international bandwidth is most certainly understated since there is no mechanism by which cross-border connections can accurately be counted. In addition, to what extent do domestic sites satisfy the needs of francophones, similar to Korea’s domestic content producers.
As the ITU report itself cautions:
These data issues make international comparisons difficult and prevent policy makers from truly assessing the development of the information society.
There is no substitute for applying critical thought to any set of simple metrics.
Digital issues will be covered with lots of critical thought at at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?