Challenging the gospel

The Bush administration is not alone in questioning the accuracy and relevancy of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s broadband penetration rankings, a constant source of heartburn for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin and others.
Market Clarity, an Australian firm launched in 2006 by telecom researcher and consultant Shara Evans, claims in a new report that OECD’s broadband reports suffer from errors in data and statistical methodology and that data reported by many of the 30 member countries is at odds with information collected by national statisticians and telecom regulators.
“The OECD statistics have an almost religious aura surrounding them, and are debated very intensely in Australia-we have a tendency to agonize over Australia’s position on the OECD table,” said Richard Chirgwin, Market Clarity’s research manager, in an e-mail to RCR Wireless News. “We became interested in the accuracy and applicability of this dataset to assessing the success/failure of broadband strategy in Australia. The debate is associated with proposals for many billions of dollars of investment, as well as very intense debate over regulation in Australia. In that sense, we felt it vital that such an important debate be based on accurate facts, and on facts that shed light on the debate.”
Australia ranks 16th in the latest OECD broadband hit parade, just a notch above the United States. Chirgwin said Market Clarity’s new report was purposefully not underwritten by a third party.
Bush telecom policy-makers, however, should not take too much comfort in Market Clarity’s frontal attack on what is often held up by cantankerous Democrats as the bible of global broadband standings. The rosy picture painted by an administration that called for universal affordable broadband by 2007 is based in significant part on outdated data-collection parameters. The House telecom and Internet subcommittee addressed that very issue last Thursday.
Wireless technology, for its part, currently accounts for only a small percentage of broadband connections, which are controlled by the cable TV-landline phone duopoly in the United States. But being the great overachiever of the telecom sector, the wireless industry will undoubtedly give the OECD, Market Clarity and others lots of fresh data to work with in coming years.