Talk:List of sovereign states by number of broadband Internet subscriptions

Please read this before updating the figures in the article:

New Discussion

A discussion has been started at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Lists of countries which could affect the inclusion criteria and title of this and other lists of countries. Editors are invited to participate. Pfainuk talk 12:06, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Problem with sorting

Is it just me who has problems with the sorting of this table? I don't get proper sorting of the peneteration figures here.... It sorts 3 as being higher than 29.8 percent. It could be locale-based (I have my computer set to Swedish). Running Firefox, the lastest & greatest... /PerLundberg (talk) 21:09, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Not just you, me too: total p.p. does not sort correctly. There it seems to correlate with footnotes someone has inserted -- wherever one of those appears that item gets sorted out of sequence -- perhaps the sort is including the footnote's numeric value somehow. I suggest the notes be removed until this gets figured out. I'd like to refer folks to this table but cannot do so now with this glitch in there. Kessler (talk) 23:24, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Duplication

This page seems to have the same purpose as List of countries by number of Internet users Should they be merged? --Opticalgirl (talk) 13:05, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

I am finding more and more articles on Wikipedia that use broadband in its popular buzzword sense. Ironically this article wikilinks to the technical term, but never defines how it is meant here.The best scenario would be to indeed merge the two into one table. Have columns for all these here, one for "total" and presumably the rest would be dial-up? Might be from different sources, however, so hard to compare. It certainly is a matter of time until "broadband internet" becomes totally meaningless, if it has not yet. The question is if dial-up access has approached zero, so is only of historical interest. My guess is yes, since the analog phones are so bad in the developig world, people are jumping right to wireless. But we need numbers and sources. W Nowicki (talk) 20:39, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Conflicting figures.

According to the sources cited in the Wiki page, the percentage of American households with broadband internet is about 27%. However, a lot of other sources online state that around two-thirds of all households have broadband internet. Is there something I'm missing here? One quarter and two thirds is a substantial difference. EDIT: Nevermind. This page gives the percentages for rate per 100 persons, not per 100 households. JGoodman (talk) 17:56, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

When to update a country's figures?

The figures for India were updated to more recent figures. I reverted them back to the 2010 figures from the ITU. My revert was reverted. I am about to revert back to the 2010 ITU figures again.

To keep these the figures for different countries comparable I think we need to stick to a set of common figures for a common year from a common source. Right now that is the 2010 figures for the ITU. If we start updating single countries as new data becomes available, the data in the table as a whole won't be very comparable. Certainly the rankings won't be fair/accurate since they will be based on comparisons of different years. We should update the table when more recent data for most countries becomes available from the ITU or some other reliable source. It would be OK to update the figures for an individual country on that country's "Internet in xxx" or "Telecommunications in xxx" pages as new data becomes available. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 16:47, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Mess deserving a nasty tag on top

Ladies and gentlemen, this article is a total mess created by non-transparent criteria for particular table columns. This may well be an impression of underqualified editor, but that's who 90% of the readers here are) I translated and filled in referenced information on my country (namely "number of broadband subscribers"). But the resulting automated sorting is simply unrealistic: there's no way a country ranked 9th in the "Top 10 Internet countries in Europe" could have a place lower than Pakistan or Colombia (whose respective number of total subscribers in the table is twice lower then that of Ukraine). For now, the article is very close to be tagged "factually inaccurate" or "disputed"( Hope for major restructuring of this page very soon. Wishes, Ukrained2012 (talk) 14:42, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

From the above is not clear to me what needs to be fixed. There are two separate tables in the article. Which one has the problems or do they both have problems? What specifically is wrong? Is it that the data in the table or tables doesn't match the cited sources? If so, which column(s) for which countries in which table? Is it that the countries don't appear in the correct order initially? If so, which countries in which table? Is it that the sorted results after you click on the sort buttons in the column headings isn't correct? If so, which column for which country in which table? Or is there some other problem? --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 01:15, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the second table, I see that the Ukraine seems to be out of order initially. It sorts into the proper spot when I click on the 'Total subscribers' column to sort it. The order of a table initially is just the order in which the countries are entered by an editor. There is no automatic sorting of the data before it is initially displayed. So, to fix the initial location of the Ukraine, we need to move the Ukraine to its proper location. I'll do that. But other than the initial location for the Ukraine, I don't see any other obvious problems. So, please confirm the problems that you see. Be as specific as you can be. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 01:15, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Updating the first table and deleting the second?

I'm getting ready to update the first table in the article with more recent data from the ITU for 2011. I'm thinking of adding Mobile Broadband subscriptions to the first table in addition to the fixed broadband figures that are in the table now. Reactions? --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 23:26, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

 Not done yet. I haven't updated the table yet, but I still plan to do so. The ITU doesn't make figures for number of mobile broadband subscriptions by country available, so unless another source for those figures can be found, I won't be able to include Mobile Broadband subscriptions by country in the update. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 03:37, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

 Partly done. I updated the article to use ITU figures for 2012. I found data on mobile broadband subscriptions in the ITU ITC EYE dynamic reporting wizard and so was able to add mobile broadband to the list. There is still some work to do to get all of the columns to sort correctly. The problem has to do with the countries that are missing data for 2012 for one of fixed or mobile, but not both. I also want to see if I can improve the table headings. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 16:49, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

And I'm considering deleting the second table entirely. I've always found the second table confusing. It isn't clear what, if any, relationship the second table has to the first. There are many more countries listed in the first table than the second. The first table is mostly or entirely based on a single common source with most entries for the same year. The second table uses many different sources with data for many different time periods. And the second table seems to be filled with many "n/a" entries for the relatively small number of countries that are listed. So, will anyone object if I delete the second table? --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 23:26, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

 Done. I went ahead and deleted the second table. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 03:37, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

ITU source

The ITU source[1] says nothing about "mobile broadband". It uses the term "mobile cellular subscriptions". Are we saying all mobile phones are using broadband? I believe mobile phones are sometimes connected to the Public switched telephone network.--Wyn.junior (talk) 22:34, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

The references are matching up?

Has anyone actually read the Excel sheets from ITU? None of this stuff is correct.--Wyn.junior (talk) 04:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. There is a massive mismatch. This article needs to be flagged. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.69.164.230 (talk) 18:25, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

The percentages of fixed broadband subscription should be calculated differently.

The number of fixed subscribers reported actually reports the number of households, not individual people connected to the broadband internet.

Therefore, the denominator to determine percentage must not be the country's population, but rather the number of households.

The numbers are readily available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_households

Of course, the percentages will go up significantly. For example, South Korea is one of the most "connected" countries in the world. The article shows that broadband penetration is 37%: 18,354,447/45,452,526. The number of households in South Korea is reported to be 15,887,128, so the actual penetration is over 100%. This probably is because a large portion of reported subscriptions belong to businesses and organizations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Azaidelson (talk • contribs) 12:09, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

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Penetration Rate

Since subscriptions are done at the household and not individual level, and cover all people in an entire household, shouldn't the penetration rate be measured as a percentage of the number of Households rather then the number of the population of individuals of a country.--J intela (talk) 02:28, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Absolutely agree. Especially "Worldwide broadband subscriptions" and "Broadband subscriptions by region" boxes are misleading as they put percentages in the same column. — Sbsail ^talk 21:12, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Update Dec 2018 - method

Just updated the table with the most recent ITU figures. Wanted to document my method of doing so: - Downloaded the Fixed Broadband and Mobile Subscription data from ITU. Both are provided as Excel-formatted spreadsheets, and are referenced in the article. - Saved them as CSV's. - Used the python code below to turn the CSV's into a Wikitext table.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv

BROADBAND = '/Users/imarlier/Documents/Fixed_broadband_2000-2017.csv'
MOBILE = '/Users/imarlier/Documents/Mobile_cellular_2000-2017.csv'

broadband = open(BROADBAND, 'r')
mobile = open(MOBILE, 'r')

broadband_reader = csv.reader(broadband)
mobile_reader = csv.reader(mobile)

def rank_countries_by_property(countries, prop):
    sorted_tuples = sorted(((props[prop], country) for (country, props) in countries.items()),
        reverse = True)
    return [t[1] for t in sorted_tuples]

countries = {}

for bs in broadband_reader:
    if bs[0] == '':
        # Likely a header row
        continue
    if bs[0] not in countries:
        print('Adding {} to the list of countries'.format(bs[0]))
        countries[bs[0]] = {}
    # Column 18 is total subscriptions, column 37 is subscriptions per 100 people
    # total subscription format is weird, with apostrophes in place of commas,
    # need to fix that.
    if bs[18] == '':
        countries[bs[0]]['fixed_broadband'] = -1
    else:
        countries[bs[0]]['fixed_broadband'] = int(bs[18].strip().replace('\'', ''))

    if bs[37] == '':
        countries[bs[0]]['fb_rate'] = -1.0
    else:
        countries[bs[0]]['fb_rate'] = float(bs[37])

for ms in mobile_reader:
    # Same logic/columns apply here
    if ms[0] == '':
        continue
    if ms[0] not in countries:
        print('Adding {} to the list of countries'.format(ms[0]))
        countries[ms[0]] = {
            'fixed_broadband': -1,
            'fb_rate': -1
        }
    if ms[18] == '':
        countries[ms[0]]['mobile_subs'] = -1
    else:
        countries[ms[0]]['mobile_subs'] = int(ms[18].strip().replace('\'', ''))

    if ms[37] == '':
        countries[ms[0]]['mobile_rate'] = -1.0
    else:
        countries[ms[0]]['mobile_rate'] = float(ms[37])

fb_rank = rank_countries_by_property(countries, 'fixed_broadband')
for i in range(0, len(fb_rank)):
    countries[fb_rank[i]]['fixed_broadband_ranking'] = i + 1

fbr_rank = rank_countries_by_property(countries, 'fb_rate')
for i in range(0, len(fbr_rank)):
    countries[fbr_rank[i]]['fb_rate_ranking'] = i + 1

ms_rank = rank_countries_by_property(countries, 'mobile_subs')
for i in range(0, len(ms_rank)):
    countries[ms_rank[i]]['ms_ranking'] = i + 1

msr_rank = rank_countries_by_property(countries, 'mobile_rate')
for i in range(0, len(msr_rank)):
    countries[msr_rank[i]]['msr_ranking'] = i + 1

wikitext_template = '| align="left" | {{{{flag |{0}}}}} || align="right" | {1} || align="center" | {2} || align="center" | {3} || align="center" | {4} ||align="right" | {5} || align="center" | {6} || align="center" | {7} || align="center" | {8}'

for (country, props) in sorted(countries.items(), key=lambda cp: cp[1]['fixed_broadband'], reverse=True):
    if props['fixed_broadband'] > 0:
        fb = '{:,}'.format(props['fixed_broadband'])
        fb_rank = '{:d}'.format(props['fixed_broadband_ranking'])
        fbr = '{:0.2f}'.format(props['fb_rate'])
        fbr_rank = '{:d}'.format(props['fb_rate_ranking'])
    else:
        fb = '-'
        fb_rank = '-'
        fbr = '-'
        fbr_rank = '-'

    if props['mobile_subs'] > 0:
        ms = '{:,}'.format(props['mobile_subs'])
        ms_rank = '{:d}'.format(props['ms_ranking'])
        msr = '{:0.2f}'.format(props['mobile_rate'])
        msr_rank = '{:d}'.format(props['msr_ranking'])
    else:
        ms = '-'
        ms_rank = '-'
        msr = '-'
        msr_rank = '-'

    print('|-')
    print(wikitext_template.format(country, fb, fb_rank, fbr, fbr_rank, ms, ms_rank, msr, msr_rank))

- Manually fixed a few country names that differed from official --Marlier (talk) 15:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

The 2020 figures are now available from the ITU https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx perhaps someone who knows their way around python can repeat the update above. Paraphrased (talk) 22:17, 10 March 2022 (UTC)