It ain't easy to speed up a country this big

Once again, the gadflies are hovering around the issue that broadband penetration in the U.S. has slowed way down, and dredging up the old news that U.S. broadband speed is comparatively dog slow compared to the rest of the world.

Is it really that bad? Sure, I'd love to have the 60-plus megabits per second that the average Japanese broadband subscriber has access to, but the logistics of offering such a service on a national scale in a country as large as the U.S. are nightmarish. The U.S. is 25 times larger in area than Japan, and 96 times larger than South Korea, the other big broadband high-flyer.

I took a look at the 20 countries where broadband penetration is the highest (they're ranked from top to bottom in the chart above), and compared the average broadband speed (per the recent Explaining International Broadband Leadership study, page 6 [PDF]) to the geographical area of each country. I then multiplied the two numbers together to give a sense of how many Mbps are available per thousand square kilometers of sheer land that has to be covered. (Higher numbers indicate faster coverage over more land.)

The exercise is simplistic but the results are interesting, if expected: Smaller countries generally have faster broadband. The bigger nations, including the U.S., Australia, and Canada, lag far behind. (Canada is considerably better off than the U.S. is, with a 7.6Mbps average vs. our 4.9Mbps average, but consider how much of the country is unpopulated. And yes, I know we have Alaska, too, but still...)

What's surprising about the chart isn't really how fast a few select countries are but how slow a few very small ones are. Look at Denmark, Switzerland, and Luxembourg: All are very well-off, industrialized countries, and all are very small (Luxembourg has just 3,000 square km to manage, about the same size as Rhode Island). All of them have slower broadband service on average than we do in the U.S.

Do we have room for improvement? Absolutely, and I believe higher-speed broadband is on the way. Regardless, the numbers aren't so grim that would should hang our heads in shame.