James Woudhuysen

One adjective I hear too much of in IT is that growth in the sales or market share of this or that widget or application is “exponential”. When IT boosters rave about exponential growth, what they should really say is “fast, but only for the moment”. True and durable exponential patterns occur in biology or physics, but not hardware, software, or telecommunications networks. In mathematics, exponential growth, like time, tends over the long term toward infinity. But in the real world, few of us will ever own more than just three mobile phones.

Thankfully, the latest report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the take-up of broadband telecommunications among its 30 member countries never talks about exponential growth; its impressive figures require no hyperbole.

Whatever kind of S-curves eventually characterise the penetration of broadband in Denmark and the Netherlands, these two countries have recently embraced DSL technology (with download speeds equal to or faster than 256kbit/s) in unprecedented style. Last year, the Danish and the Dutch moved from about 25 DSL subscribers per 100 people to nearly 32. That’s the highest level of enthusiasm for DSL throughout the OECD.

In Japan and Korea, people are upgrading from DSL to high-bandwidth fibre. Indeed, at nearly 8m subscribers, there are more fibre users in Japan than there are users of DSL in 23 other OECD countries.

To justify prejudices, economists and policy makers tend to argue about how much different national preferences for market liberalisation or state intervention explain different purchases of broadband. Yet the OECD is more illuminating. It shows that there is only a very modest correlation between population density and fondness for broadband: cheek-by-jowl South Koreans are fans, but so are households in the wide-open spaces of Sweden, Norway and Canada. There seems to be a much stronger correlation between broadband take-up and GDP per head.

Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and Mexico, for example, do badly on both counts.
Broadly speaking, to be rich is to have broadband. But having a long coastline helps: along with wealthy but landlocked Switzerland and Luxembourg, Iceland and South Korea favour broadband more than Germany or Austria.

High-speed internet links to the world may have special appeal to prosperous trading powers with maritime traditions. The obscure adjective that captures broadband growth, then, isn’t exponential; it’s littoral ­ as long as we don’t take that too literally.