National Broadband Plans

This report surveys national broadband plans (NBP) across the OECD area, providing an overview of common elements and goals in those plans. An annex to this report contains references and links to the plans.

OECD countries have previously-agreed key areas of broadband policies, which have been incorporated into NBPs, notably the 2004 Council Recommendation on Broadband and the 2008 Declaration of the Seoul Ministerial for the Future of the Internet Economy.

Policy makers have been updating NBPs, taking into account the effects of the global financial crisis (GFC). The communications industry has emerged relatively well from the GFC, partly due to the experience of the “dot-com bubble”. There has been continued growth in demand for broadband services, at a time when many other sectors experienced a decline. Some governments injected funds, either directly or through support for loans, to help the geographic expansion of broadband access networks, the upgrading of existing networks to higher speeds and also through measures to encourage adoption amongst social and economic groups with limited use of broadband. Governments assessed these interventions based on their costs, benefits and effects on markets.

The benefits of NBPs are expected to be extensive across economies and societies. This has required co-ordination amongst many ministries and agencies, in order to identify realistic targets and to ensure that processes are in place to monitor their achievement.
Given the high profile of broadband policies, headline goals are increasingly likely to be found in formal government programmes. At the same time, NBPs are, in most countries, adopted by an individual ministry or by the council of ministers, giving them less standing than legislation and often leaving them outside formal processes for assessment and review. This also provides flexibility for adjustments when these are required.

With more targets requiring adoption of high-speed broadband, rather than availability, broadband plans are increasingly found to contain a wider range of mechanisms, supplementing the traditional focus on economic interventions.

In many countries there are complex co-ordination mechanisms between the broadband activities of different levels of government: federal, state or provincial and municipal. There is also co-ordination between ministries, to ensure appropriate targets and outcomes for e-inclusion, e-government, e-health, plus contributions to the creation of jobs and to economic growth.