How does Britain’s broadband compare?

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Sayer continued: “By requiring that capacity to be shared, through leasing, with competitors, open access rules are intended to encourage entry by those competitors, who can then focus their own investments and innovation on electronics and services that use that basic infrastructure.”

All these positive efforts in Sweden have left the UK lagging behind somewhat, even though we have adopted an open policy with the BT Openreach division, leasing out lines to competitors to provide customers with broadband and telephone lines.

However, Sweden does face stiff competition from some of its neighbours such as Denmark and Finland, who are also riding high with good download speeds and promises of faster ones in the future.

South Korea

South Korea is renowned for its high speeds as much as the region itself is renowned for its technological innovations.

“South Korea has a much more aggressive policy on a wide scale,” said Bamforth. “It has more connections in both urban and rural areas and is really pushing for speed.”

And he isn’t wrong. South Korea regularly tops the polls with an average download speed of 20.4Mbps and last year the country topped a worldwide Gartner poll of broadband penetration with a massive 93 per cent of homes ticking the right boxes.

The UK only came in seventh place with about 58 per cent but although this shows we have catching up to do, only five countries managed to break the 60 per cent barrier.

However, Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s Champion for Digital Inclusion, recently said: “Korea may be far ahead with speeds but how many people are using them? From my understanding it is [not many].”

She added: “I don't believe the data measures it in the right way yet, you can measure access but you can’t measure interaction.”

France

Back in 2000, France was considered to have one of the worst broadband markets in the whole of the developed world. But, over the past few years it has come on leaps and bounds to become one of the best.

The country opened up its broadband back in 2004 allowing rivals to take advantage of France Telecom’s (FT) existing infrastructure. This led to a great rise in competition with a lowering of prices and even led to FT becoming the first major telecoms company in Europe to roll out VoIP in residential scenarios.

This year, the number of subscribers almost hit 60 million and penetration in the country hit an outstanding 91.8 per cent. What's more, 30 per cent of the country also had access to high speed broadband.

Back in June, the Constitutional Council even went as far to declare access to the internet as a basic human right, when President Sarkozy tried to push through a three strikes law to combat internet piracy.

However, Sayer believes it is the earlier point that has seen France become so successful.

“[Some] countries have spent substantially more, in public spending on a per capita basis, than the US has appropriated for stimulus funding… [however] there are models of high performing countries, like France, that invested almost nothing directly, and instead relied almost exclusively on fostering a competitive environment," he said.

France has some impressive figures compared to the UK and a lot of backing from the public as well as private sector. It is clear they lead the way compared to the UK but perhaps we should look to them and take some of their advice to improve our own situation.

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