Tunisia broadband
Following on from last week’s China broadband post this tweet mentioning Tunisia broadband caught my eye
Every familiy in #Tunisia 2b connected w/ highspeed #broadband in nxt 5yrs #WSIS #connect2020 says Minister Communications Noaman Fehri
— conneally (@conneally) May 26, 2015
Just goes to show how vital broadband is seen to be everywhere. You can imagine every government looking at league tables for broadband speed and % coverage and thinking “we have to get our country up the table if we want to be competitive”.
I’ve lost track of where the UK is in it’s progress towards ubiquity in broadband services. As I recall the target was 95% of the population by (the end of) 2017. I did follow it for some years but my enthusiasm became bogged down in the mire of government obfuscation (quite like that phrase 🙂 ) and the general lack of transparency associated with the whole project. You get my drift.
I guess if you live in an idyllic rural hamlet surrounded by meadows, tinkling streams and birdsong but don’t yet have decent internet access you will have been following progress of the fibre broadband roll-out very closely. All I can say is that one of the reasons I might eventually move to said paradise is to get away from it all, but I know I’m not helping here.
The last census (2011) showed the UK having a population of 63.2 million people living in 26.4 million households. The OECD report of 2014 suggested the UK had 36.2 broadband lines per 100 people (23.2 million lines). That gives 87.88 penetration of broadband to households in the UK in 2014. The data, which was supplied by HM Govt will have been old at the time and will also now be out of date in any case.
I imagine we are still on for the 95% in 2017. Don’t know how this compares with Tunisia’s 100% by 2020 but I doubt the UK will be at that level. I’m not suggesting that Tunisia is a major competitor of the UK in global markets but they will almost certainly have worse problems in connecting to rural communities than us in the UK. From the tweet it’s also not possible to tell what the Tunisian government minister means when it says “high speed”. In fact it’s difficult to find out much about broadband in Tunisia using Google.
The point is that Tunisia is demonstrating the right kind of ambition.
Should anyone have any more info then feel free to share. In the meantime I’ll just be looking at brochures for country cottages surfing Tunisian holiday websites cracking on in the office here with my high speed ja.net connection.
See ya!
