OECD Broadband Ranking System Needs Restructuring, Says Think Tank

Basing telecommunications policy around the faulty ranking system of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would lead to an "ill-defined national broadband strategy," officials from the Phoenix Center think tank said. Decrying the widespread assumption that America has fallen behind the rest of the world in broadband penetration, George Ford and Lawrence Spiwak criticized the OECD's ranking system at a luncheon in the Rayburn House Office Building. The current OECD system ranks measures broadband penetration on a per capita, and not a per household basis, which has led to countries with smaller household sizes moving up in the chart since 2001. People do not buy broadband connections, Ford said; rather, households and businesses buy broadband connections. Moreover, said Ford and Spiwak, countries that have risen in recent rankings - Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands - are small and do not have large rural areas where broadband deployment remains a challenge. Additionally, many countries that were near the top in broadband rankings in 2001 have since fallen, said Ford. "Miracle" Japan has dropped in the OECD ratings, for example. In spite of having 100 Megabit per second-capable broadband networks, Japan ranked behind the U.S. in the December 2007 OECD ratings.