I hear people talk about the need for affordable broadband. It comes up in lots of broadband planning meetings – from the Minnesota Ultra-Speed Broadband Task Force down. It comes up and then often it gets dropped because I think everyone has a different definition of affordable. This becomes particularly sticky when you have providers in the room.

Thanks to Ann Higgins for passing on a great article on cost of broadband from CED Magazine (Next Challenge: Making Broadband Affordable for Everyone). They look at affordability on an international scope by looking at cost for broadband versus local annual income. Here are the specifics…

Analyzing tariff data from the middle of 2011, Point Topic compared the cost of 12 months of subscription to the cheapest, and usually slowest, fixed broadband service . Converting prices to purchasing power parity (PPP) equivalents for more than 2,000 tariffs from around the world, and then combining the results with the gross national income per capita (GNI/capita) – again at PPP rates – for the relevant country, allows direct comparison between the markets. The analysis is based on data from 64 countries.

And here are charts:

I don’t want to minimize affordability – but looking at the International scope, we see that the US is somewhere in the middle for affordability. For some folks in the US I think affordability isn’t the issue so much as making broadband a priority – and that will take training to change. Also that may change as the device used to get online becomes less expensive as well as sometimes it’s not the ongoing costs up the upfront expense of the computer that can be prohibitive.