3.5. Universal access
Broadband connections in households are an indicator of people’s access to information and services. Disparities in broadband access are partly explained by urban-rural divides within countries, particularly in countries with lower per capita incomes. Urban-rural divides in access can occur for a variety of reasons including fixed broadband networks not extending into some rural areas (lack of availability), lower uptake in rural areas, which may be associated with broadband prices being higher in harder-to-serve areas, incomes being lower, etc., and divides in terms of broadband quality (speed, latency, reliability and so on. See page 3.7 for more information).
Information from regulators shows that rural households, in many OECD countries, are less likely to be covered by, and thus have the option to purchase, fixed broadband with a contracted speed of 30 Mbps or more. Such a speed is sufficient to support relatively demanding, but increasingly commonplace, consumer applications such as streaming high-definition video. In almost half of the countries presented, fewer than 50% of rural households are located in areas with such connections available. Country size, topology and population spread are important factors in this regard. In Luxembourg and the Netherlands, almost all households, both urban and rural, are covered by broadband of 30 Mbps or more. Speeds of 1 Gbps are also common in both urban and rural areas in Japan and Korea. However, rural availability is much lower in countries such as Finland and Sweden, which have vast, sparsely populated, mountainous regions. France stands out, with only 52% of all households being covered in 2017.
Household ICT usage surveys provide a different perspective through statistics on connections purchased by households. However, these data also include broadband subscriptions with contracted speeds below 30 Mbps (and as slow as 256 Kbps). Results show that urban and rural households have roughly equal uptake of such connections in many OECD countries. However, the disparity remains wide in some other countries: twice as many urban households than rural households were connected to broadband in Brazil, and urban led rural by over 20 percentage points in Greece and Portugal in 2018. These and other countries have seen marked increases in both urban and rural broadband coverage since 2010.
Taken together, these statistics indicate that households’ demand for connectivity appears roughly equal in both urban and rural areas in OECD countries. However, rural areas are often served by slower connections than urban areas, which may limit the ways in which rural households and businesses can benefit from Internet access.
A large majority of businesses today make use of ICTs. In 2018, on average 92% of enterprises in OECD countries had a broadband subscription. However, the share with contracted speeds of 30 Mbps or more is often much lower. For example, less than half of EU firms with broadband have speeds of 30 Mbps or more, and only 40% of EU small businesses have such speeds. Nevertheless, the share of businesses with subscriptions of 30 Mbps or more has at least doubled since 2011 in all countries shown.
In many OECD countries, fewer than half of rural households are located in areas where fixed broadband of 30Mbps or more is available.
Definitions
Available indicates that a commercial fixed line subscription with a speed of 30Mbps or more is offered for the household to purchase if they wish.
Broadband connections refers fixed line broadband services (i.e. of 256 Kbps advertised speed or more) subscriptions purchased by households or businesses. Fixed broadband comprises DSL, cable, fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), fibre-to-the-building (FTTB), satellite, terrestrial fixed wireless and other fixed-wired technologies.
According to the OECD Regional Typology (Brezzi et al., 2011), a region is classified as rural if more than half of the population lives in local units with a population density below 150 inhabitants per square kilometre and urban if less than 15% live in such low-density local units. In Japan and Korea the threshold is 500 inhabitants, as population density exceeds 300 inhabitants per square kilometre nationally.
Firm size classes are defined as small (10 to 49 persons employed), medium (50 to 249) and large (above 250).
Measurability
Information on broadband availability is collected and reported by communications regulators.
Data on household and business broadband connections are gathered through surveys on ICT usage. These allow for the collection of useful contextual details in comparison to subscriptions data from regulators, though surveys are less suited to collecting specific technical details. Surveys are generally carried out annually but are less frequent in Australia and Canada. The OECD actively encourages the collection of comparable information in this field through guidelines in the “Model Survey on ICT Access and Usage by Households and Individuals” (OECD, 2015a). and “Model Survey on ICT Access and Usage by Businesses” (OECD, 2015b)
The OECD Regional Typology is based on population density, hence it cannot discriminate between regions close to a large populated centre and remote regions. To account for these differences, it has been extended to include an additional criterion based on the driving time needed for 50% of the population of a region to reach a population centre (Brezzi et al., 2011). At present, the extended typology has only been computed for regions in North America and Europe.
Source: OECD calculations based on CRTC, Communications Monitoring Report, 2017(Canada); EC, Study on Broadband Coverage in Europe 2017 (European Union) and FCC, 2018 Broadband Deployment Report (United States). See 1.
← 1. Rural areas: For EU countries, rural areas are those with a population density less than 100 per square kilometre. For Canada, rural areas are those with a population density less than 400 per square kilometre. For the United States, rural areas are those with a population density less than 1 000 per square mile or 386 people per square kilometre.
Fixed broadband coverage: For EU countries, coverage of NGA technologies (VDSL, FTTP, DOCSIS 3.0) capable of delivering at least 30 Mbps download was used. For the United States, coverage of fixed terrestrial broadband capable of delivering 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload services was used; data refer to 2016.
Source: OECD, ICT Access and Usage by Households and Individuals Database, http://oe.cd/hhind, December 2018. See 1.
← 1. For Brazil, data refer to 2016 instead of 2018. Areas are defined as urban or rural according to local legislation, as compiled by the NSO. Reported data refer to urban (densely populated) and rural (thinly populated).
For Chile, data refer to 2012 and 2017. For the year 2012, large urban areas refer to a contiguous set of local areas, each of which has a density superior to 500 inhabitants per square kilometre, where the total population for the set is at least 50 000 inhabitants. Rural areas refer to a contiguous set of local areas belonging neither to a densely populated nor to an intermediate area. An intermediate area refer to a contiguous set of local areas, not belonging to a densely populated area, each of which has a density superior to 100 inhabitants per square kilometre, and either with a total population for the set of at least 50 000 inhabitants or adjacent to a densely populated area.
For Switzerland, data refer to 2012 and 2017.
For the United Kingdom, data refer to 2009 instead of 2010.
For the United States, data refer to 2017 instead of 2018. Population density categories are approximated based on a household’s location in a principal city, the balance of a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) or neither. To protect respondent confidentiality, the information has been redacted from some observations in the public use datasets. Beginning in 2017, the CPS Supplement no longer asks separately about mobile broadband use inside and outside the home. Instead, households are simply asked whether anyone uses a mobile data plan (irrespective of location). In order to approximate mobile broadband access at home, households were included if they reported mobile data plan use and home Internet use.
Source: OECD, ICT Access and Usage by Businesses Database, http://oe.cd/bus, December 2018. See 1.
← 1. For Australia, data refer to the fiscal year 2015/16 ending on 30 June.
For Brazil, data refer to 2016. Broadband is defined by type of connection rather than download speed. The definition includes: DSL, cable modem, fibre, radio, satellite and 3G/4G.
For Colombia, data refer to the main type of Internet connection that businesses use.
For Iceland, data refer to 2014.
For Korea, data refer to both fixed and mobile broadband.
For New Zealand, data refer to the fiscal year 2015/16 ending on 30 June.