Still in Pursuit of the Fast Lane - Adoption, Usage, and Global Impact of Broadband Technologies - page 9

Table 5. Future proof status of broadband services in selected countries

Ready for tomorrow Comfortable for today Meeting needs for today Below needs for today

Korea Switzerland Iceland Malta

Japan Czech Republic Estonia Luxembourg

Sweden Norway Greece Chile

Lithuania United States Singapore China

Bulgaria Slovakia Canada Qatar

Latvia Portugal United Kingdom Brazil

Netherlands Finland Australia Argentina

Romania France Spain Saudi Arabia

Denmark Germany Poland Cyprus

Hungary New Zealand Costa Rica

Russia Ukraine Bahrain

Belgium Turkey Thailand

Slovenia Ireland Tunisia

Taiwan Italy Mexico

Austria Philippines

Hong Kong UAE

Malaysia
Pakistan
Colombia
Morocco
Vietnam
South Africa
Indonesia

Source: BBCNews (2009)

and social networkers demand speed and quality
of access. For the gamers, speed and quality are
paramount - even more so than for the business
market. For the file-sharing market, which uses
applications that accelerate data usage through
multiple upload streams from a typical user's
machine, a data cap of any size is highly resented.
Social networking site (e.g. MySpace, Facebook,
Twitter) and Web 2.0 applications (e.g. YouTube)
have brought about a shift in mindsets, whereby
consumers are socializing and sharing content
online to a much greater extent than they did
before. This has even prompted some employers
to restrict access to social networking and such
sites in the workplace in order to minimize the

negative effect on productivity. Nonetheless, the
Internet (and particularly broadband) is definitely
seen as a lifestyle enhancement platform.
SME Demand: ADSL has found a ready and
enthusiastic market among small businesses. Such
users are not as price-sensitive as home users,
nor are they as focused on capacity issues like
contention ratios and upload/download restric-
tions. Here, the solution represents a significant
cost saving by preventing the business having to
dial-up on a regular basis to send/retrieve e-mail
and has also had the positive spin-off of allowing
the enterprise to embrace online communications.
Thus, the SOHO market, micro-enterprises and
small business alike have realised instant cost