US broadband: still expensive, underwhelming

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this week released an update to its much-watched set of broadband metrics. The data set now extends through December 2009, and the US continues to look anemic on most OECD measures. How about price? The US comes in 19th when measured on "cost per Mbps." The OECD numbers use Purchasing Power Parity to ensure that the dollar amounts are comparable between countries, and US broadband turns out to cost $8 for each advertised Mbps of service. In Korea, it's $1.76. The UK, not known for fast speeds, but having decent competition thanks to line-sharing rules, is $1.98. Japan is $2.33. This metric doesn't take into effect the larger size of each US household, nor does it say anything about the effects of population density. In addition, the US as a single huge country gets compared to much smaller countries like Japan and the UK, while companies like Verizon argue that the better metric is to compare the entire US to the entire EU. When this is done, the US doesn't look so bad.