Australia has risen four places in Broadband world rankings which currently witnesses our position as 12th overall. That's the good news. However, the latest OECD figures show that Australia has also started dragging the chain again and fallen behind other advanced countries due to the unresolved new FTTH Broadband Network status which the government has procrastinated with for quite sometime now.
Senator Coonan is bound to jump up and down about the elevated rankings position (whoopee do), but the real issues for Australians regards our future! The current progress Coonan and the Federal Government have made with the FTTH network development (or should I say lack of) overshadows any positives made from a higher world ranking. It's not the jump to 12th place from 16th that we should be focused upon, it's this lack of vision and progress (rated zero by the OECD) which places Australia way behind the likes of Japan and Korea. It's this statistic that should be of major concern. Let's get real here, we're still very far from where we need to position ourselves on a 'broadband level' for this country to really power ahead as a prosperous nation and a potential world leader in technology.
Australia's increased broadband ranking was the good news. The bad was that, with FTTH presently stalled, we are falling even further behind the most advanced nations.
Fibre connections account for 36 percent of all Japanese broadband subscriptions and 31 percent in Korea." The figure in Australia was so low as to be rated zero!
Source: ITWire OECD article.