Evolution in Broadband Technology and Future of Wireless Broadband - Adoption, Usage, and Global Impact of Broadband Technologies - page 238

the growth process. Access to knowledge,
however, is dependent on availability of
information and communications infra-
structure systems. While a well-developed
information infrastructure can serve as a
catalyst to the growth process by facilitating
rapid diffusion of knowledge, inadequacy of
such an infrastructure can constrain growth
by limiting access to sources of technical
change
11 The availability of BB infrastructure in the
host countries also attract FDI and encour-
ages job migration from foreign companies
to host nations (out Sourcing)
12 Estimate obtained from ITU website, ICT
Statistics News-blog
13 ITU database of June 2009 has incomplete
data for 2008. Therefore, we used the data
for 2007
14 On March, 2008, in ICT Statistics New-
log hosted by ITU (www.itu.in), a report
was posted with distribution of world BB
subscribers by technology for Q4 of 2007.
According that report, 65.19% of world BB
subscribers use DSL, 21.95% use Cable
Modem and 12.86% use other technology
for BB connections.
15 It is important to highlight here is that most
of the countries listed in Table 4 are mall
countries in compare to Western country
like USA or Asian country such as India or
China. In large countries, individual states
or sections may have broadband penetration
that exceeds that of these similarly sized
small country leaders. Extensive rural areas
in large countries may also make deploy-
ment of nationwide infrastructure a bigger
job than that in a small country. In addition
to that, nation's population and urbanization
structure also play important role towards
achieving high BB penetration rate.
16 As a fixed BB subscriber (based on ITU
definition) refers to a connection between
a physical location and a point of presence

providing access to the Internet, there could
be multiple users at that location (in the case
of multi-users HH and multi-users business).
Hence one can expect that the number of
users will be far higher than the number of
subscribers counted in this manner. Further
the fixed BB speed includes an open range
with minimum speed of 256 Kbit/s in at
least one direction.
17 Mobile BB subscribers represent here num-
ber of mobile BB subscriptions and ITU'
defined mobile BB subscriptions as number
of subscriptions to mobile cellular networks
with access to data communications (e.g. the
Internet) at broadband speeds (here defined
as greater than or equal to 256 kbit/s in one
or both directions)
18 One important reason for that is the size of
USA in comparison of other countries in the
list of top 10.
19 One such issue is the subscription to multiple
SIM cards by a single subscriber which is
much dependant on the country specific
roaming price structure. In addition to that,
in some countries Pre-paid subscriptions
dominate the Post-paid subscriptions.
Such differences in subscription behavior
can generate bias in measuring count of
mobile BB subscriptions across countries.
Many discussions took place in 7 th World
Telecommunications/ICT indicators meet-
ing at Egypt in March, 2009 to highlight such
issues and challenges related to measuring
mobile broadband access and mobile broad-
band subscribers/subscriptions.
20 The observed behavior in growth rate is
based on the underling definition of fixed
and mobile BB subscribers used in ITU da-
tabase and any modification of either fixed
or mobile BB subscribers can change the
interpretation of the behavior.