As anyone who has ever lived or worked in Japan or Korea can attest, coming west is a drag. The broadband infrastructure in Europe and North America is simply not up to speed on this side of the world.

I was reminded of this last month while travelling through Seoul and Tokyo, hearing a fair number of references to 100 megabit-per-second (Mbps) home connections. I kept quiet: I poke along at about 5Mbps here in Rome for a service that Telecom Italia advertises as 20Mbps. Grumble, grumble.

When I left Asia I was determined to find out just how far behind we are running in the West? It’s worse than I thought.

According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the Japanese zip around the net at an average speed of 61Mbps. The Koreans clock in, on average, at 45.6Mbps.

In Europe, the speediest countries are Finland, Sweden and France, with average broadband speeds of 21.7, 18.2 and 17.6Mbps respectively. Across the Atlantic, Canada rings up 7.6Mbps and the United States, in the middle of the pack, comes in at 4.8Mbps. And what about Britain? Near the bottom, with a plodding 2.6Mbps.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that in the next 18 months to two years much of rest of the developed world should catch up with Japan and South Korea. Well, many of us, anyway.

Market by market, telecoms and cable TV providers are investing in next-generation data networks. In many neighbourhoods, the last of the old copper lines are being replaced by shiny fibre-optic cable capable of carrying voice, data and video. The speedy new lines will run either straight to the home or relatively nearby, to a kerbside cabinet.

Worldwide, the deployment will run to tens of billions of pounds in capital expenditures. Richard Allan, head of government affairs for Cisco Systems in Britain and Ireland, says that 70 per cent of the cost of wiring up a community comes in just “digging up the roads.” Unless, you live in Paris. The City of Light, he adds, has a commodious sewer system enabling rival broadband providers to cheaply string their fibre through the subterranean network, giving the French capital an edge on most European cities.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom’s roll-out of a nationwide IPTV service is relying on a technology called VDSL, Mr Allan points out. They will run fibre to a central box that delivers a 50Mbps broadband connection to a number of homes on the street. VDSL uses the old copper lines that run the last few metres to the home, but the new kerbside configuration will generate a theoretical maximum speed that is twice as fast as the ADSL2+ line common today.

In the United States, AT&T is rolling out a version of VDSL too. Its biggest rival, Verizon, is more ambitious, opting for direct fibre to the home.

“We can currently expect to have in most urban areas new fibre being laid down over the next 18 months to two years. We will have massive deployment across much of Europe,” says Mr Allan, “but the UK is still a bit of a question mark.”

Britain is a unique market in that it has a relatively high broadband penetration rate, but at speeds considerably slower than its neighbours. That’s because of two factors, Mr Allan says. The civil infrastructure costs (the tab for digging up roads) is higher than in just about all other countries. And, there is a relatively large percentage of the rural population who would like a proper broadband connection but live too far from the nearest exchange. Once you move out of city and suburban areas, you have few options other than a 70-year-old copper phone line running to your house.

But there is some help here too. A host of wireless technologies such as WiMAX are being rolled out (though not as quickly as first hoped) to bring speedy connections to ever more remote areas. Also, if your community has cable TV service, you may be in luck with another promising technology called DOCSIS that supercharges the existing cable infrastructure. DOCSIS is being deployed by the UK cable provider Virgin Media.

Mr Allan says that Cisco has been working with Dutch cable TV provider UPC on DOCSIS-3 deployment trials in The Netherlands. Recently, in a series of tests Cisco and UPC achieved speeds of 120 mbps.

“The tests show this technology is ready to go. Now it is just a matter of figuring out the business sense,” he adds.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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