Travel China and Beyond

Broadband Web Access - What is going on with Web Access around the world

Recently my family and I have been traveling in Bulgaria.  We have visited the country 5 times since 1995.  There have been many postitive developments in the economy and living conditions in the country and this made me think about an interesting case of how the Internet and access to it gets enabled in different parts of the world.  In the 1990s Internet access was growing rapidly in the US.  I remember being required (by my professors) to submit homeworks and projects via email.  We had to use the engineering department workstations (Do you remember Digital Equipment Corp.?  — the famous and now gone, Dec Stations…) and the tools that came with them like FTP, Telnet, E-mail clients, to access BBS sites setup by our professors for the purposes of class exercises.  It was an exciting time.  We felt so hip

Then dial-up started growing (as penetration among consumers and businesses) really fast.  AOL, Excite@Home, and others became big portals.  Then Yahoo came — and all these sites were optimized for text based browsing mostly — after all the dial-up modems (eventhough they progressed rapidly) topped out at 56kbps (and for most users actually at 48kbps or even less 24kbps due to bad phone wires)….The US was in the lead.

Now the situation has changed drastically.  Broadband Internet access even in small countries like Bulgaria is growing fast and is very low cost.  Recently on a trip to this country I passed by numerous billboards advertising 2Mbps ADSL connections for 15.95 leva per month.  This is the equivalent of US$11.15/month!  In the small village of Krqn (on the outskirts of Kazanlak — the main city in the Rose Valley), cable modem access is about US$10/month….

Recently even the New York times ran an article on the rapid drop in worldwide position of the US with regard to broadband subscription rates.  The US is now behind most Western European countries (e.g. France, Denmark, ….) even behind countries like Estonia (former Soviet republic).

I am not sure why the US is lagging in availability of broadband, but that could certainly have implications on both e-commerce as well as delivery of new services like VoIP, Video on demand, IPTV (TV over packet), and potentially be also a barrier to innovation.  After all the Amazon.com, eBay, etc. were developed in an era (sounds so long ago but it was only 7-10 years ago) when the US had dominant position in Internet access….so will we miss on the next wave of new business models….?