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Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Broadband goal eludes Europe via IHT

Europe set an ambitious 10-year goal for itself at the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000: to become "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world." A key component was broadband services, the always-on fast Internet access needed to link Europe's businesses, schools, government services and hospitals.Four years later, the Lisbon goal appears "unachievable," said Ewan Sutherland, executive director of the International Telecommunications Users Group, a nonprofit association that tracks telecom services and costs for big business customers."If you employ enough statisticians, you can paint a positive picture, but the sad reality is we are not ahead of Asia and we are not ahead of the United States," said Sutherland. "The overall picture, I am sorry to say, is gloomy."Compared with other developed regions of the world, Europeans are stuck in the slowest lane of the information superhighway and are paying the biggest tolls. North America and parts of Asia have introduced higher-speed, cheaper services at a faster rate.And despite European Commission claims that the gap is narrowing, the differences are actually widening, say some industry observers.Broadband isn't just about having Web pages that load on a personal computer quickly. Because the speed is much faster than connections via dial-up modems, broadband makes commercial transactions, file transfers, and sound- and video-playing nearly instantaneous. That has broad repercussions for those doing business and providing social and information services on the Internet.The other big difference in Europe is the speed of the connection. "Broadband" itself has no defined speed, but is generally assumed to be faster than 256 kilobits per second. In Japan, telecom carriers have improved their networks up to a speed of 46 megabits per second - almost 200 times what is considered the minimum speed. A quick asessment of the progress made thus far indicate that "The next generation of services and the new business activities will be developed in Asia, rather than in Europe"

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