The U.S. is currently ranked 15th among OECD countries for per capita broadband subscriptions. According to competitiveness advocates the rank is "too low." However, are the OECD rankings an accurate policy-relevant measure of broadband adoption? A new report by the Phoenix Center concludes this measure is conceptually misleading and proposes a different and approach to adoption measurement. They call it a value-based Broadband Adoption Index ("BAI") that compares the actual value to society that results from the adoption of broadband technology to a target level of adoption value. This target level will vary from country to country and is a function of the social value of broadband connectivity, measured as the difference in the social benefits and the costs of broadband. The BAI is specifically designed to accommodate and include the value of different connection modalities like mobile broadband into a single index, something that merely summing the number of connections cannot do. Merely summing the number of broadband connections—and making arbitrary decisions as to whether to include one form of broadband access over another—does not provide useful insight for policy guidance. "Making sure that all Americans have access to broadband is serious business, and measuring broadband's economic and social impact requires serious tools of analysis," said Lawrence J. Spiwak, president and co-author at Phoenix Center, in a statement. "Broadband access is important to society because it is believed to spur economic growth and development, but different methods of access provide different impacts to economic and social activity. The approach we outline today is the first attempt to analyze the full social value of different methods of broadband access and place them into one index." George S. Ford, chief economist at Phoenix Center and co-author of the study stated, "A relatively low-speed mobile connection may have tremendous value to a low-income consumer that does not own a computer, and the value to society of connecting that person may be far greater than boosting download speeds from 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps in a rich suburban area."
A full copy of PHOENIX CENTER POLICY PAPER NO. 36, The Broadband Adoption Index: Improving Measurements and Comparisons of Broadband Deployment and Adoption, may be downloaded at: http://www.phoenix-center.org/pcpp/PCPP36Final.pdf.
An Executive Summary of the BAI may be found at: http://www.phoenix-center.org/BAIExecutiveSummary.pdf.
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