There have been two major recent studies of the quality of telecoms, Internet access, third-generation networks, and so on, across countries: one conducted by the OECD and one by Harvard's Berkman Center.
The Berkman Center is the one with which I'm more familiar. It accepts some criticism of the OECD report but still ranks Canada rather badly. Canada was number two in penetration after South Korea in 2003, I think, in a previous OECD report. We had more households and more people connected to the Internet than any country except South Korea. By 2008, we had fallen to number 10.
In the top speed available to customers over the Internet, we were 19th in the OECD report by 2008. In the price of low-speed connections, we were the 21st best country in the OECD report. In the price of medium-speed connections, we were the 23rd best country in the OECD in 2008. In high-speed connections, we were the second worst. Only the Slovak Republic imposed more costs on Internet users for high-speed connections than we did.
We weren't even ranked in the very high-speed category because none of our major national providers provided that service.
The Harvard study looks at specific firms, and then it draws diagrams of clusters, because different firms have different plans at different prices. You get these diagrams with all sorts of dots where the different plans offered by different firms cluster. Our Canadian firms tend to cluster in the low-quality, high-price parts of almost every single graph in the Harvard study.
I think Harvard rates us number 19 among OECD countries in terms of overall price/quality trade-off. Those are pretty sad things. You can always find one good thing. If I look at the Canadian Internet sites, they say they're the best in dollars per minute. There are all sorts of ways of doing this. If we're bad in terms of the value and price of unlimited packages, then we can look at dollars per kilobyte.
If our connections are really slow, then we can look at dollars per minute. You can always slice it in some way that makes Canada look good, but it's hard to make a case that we're where we should be.