Canada's Internet lags behind other countries: Study

CanWest — Canada is lagging behind other industrialized countries because it forces consumers to pay high prices for slow broadband Internet service, says a recent report by Harvard University.

The 232-page report by the school's Berkman Center for Internet and Society gave Canada an overall ranking of 22 out of 30 countries, based on the affordability, accessibility and speed of the country's broadband Internet.

Released late Wednesday, the report, which was commissioned for the Federal Communications Commission — the U.S. counterpart of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — also placed Canada 25th in affordability of the Internet.

"The highest prices for the lowest speeds are overwhelmingly offered by firms in the United States and Canada, all of which inhabit markets structured around 'inter-modal' competition — that is, competition between one incumbent owning a telephone system, and one incumbent owning a cable system," said the report.

Canada also ranked 16th in the category of access to wireless technology, down from second place in 2003.

The report even singles out Canada as a country where Internet policies should not be mirrored.

"As with speed and entry-level prices, however, Canada's performance merits caution when observing its policies," it said. "While penetration there is high, not only is speed lower, but prices, too, are high in every tier of service."

The report blamed the low rankings on the country's "regulatory hesitation."

"Canada looks like a case where the concern for incumbent investment incentives, without quite reaching to the level of abstention, resulted in a weaker version of unbundling than was implemented in many of the other countries we reviewed here," it said.

Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa, said Thursday he wasn't surprised by the results of the study.

"Frankly, countries all around the world typically get far better deals for much faster speeds than Canadians experience, and they get it for far less," he told Global News.

Meanwhile, Finland officials announced Thursday that the country will now guarantee all citizens be legally entitled to a minimum broadband connection speed of one megabit per second.

It's the first country in the world to make universal minimum Internet access speeds a legal requirement.