Those who favor more government control of the Internet ignore this private progress and point to international rankings. According to OECD estimates, the U.S. ranks 15th in the world in broadband penetration per capita. But because household sizes differ from country to country, and the U.S. has relatively large households, the per capita figures can be misleading. A better way to gauge wired broadband connections is per household, not per person. By that measure the U.S. ranks somewhere between 8th and 10th.
I don’t understand why larger households is at all relevant to understanding broadband penetration. The per-capita penetration answers the question of what fraction of people live in a home with broadband. The per-household penetration answers what fraction of households have broadband. This second ranking isn’t the object of interest. There are many reasons why larger households would be more likely to have broadband, it is a fixed cost per month so its cost can be spread among more users, larger households are richer, and families may need it because they want to work from home to be with children or assist with homework. But none of those factors say anything about the pricing of relative pricing and quality of American broadband. All other things equal, America is richer and more of us live in large households than most other rich country denizens, which suggests that our per-capita penetration should be higher, not lower than our per-household ranking. But in fact we find the opposite. I’m confused.
Nice blog, just stumbled upon via Blogcatalogs Listing. By the way, I have just added a Reference List to my economics blog with economic data series, history, bibliographies etc. for students & researchers.