Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-04-Speech-2-236"
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"en.20010904.9.2-236"2
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". – Mr President, cost of access is the key determinant of Internet use and policies to reduce the cost by introducing more competition are central to the year of action plan. In view of this the Internal Market Council in November last year endorsed a set of indicators to benchmark the year of action plan, which included the cost of access. When defining the access price indicator, the Council specified the source to be OECD, supplemented if necessary by a Commission study. The advantage of the OECD data was that it enabled comparisons to be made with third countries and especially the United States.
OECD data was used in the Commission's report to the Stockholm European Council. The data includes unmetered access, however their methodology considers only prices charged by the dominant telecom operating in each country. In practice, this meant that there were too few figures available to merit their inclusion in the website. To overcome this methodology, the Commission called for tender for studies to measure Internet access prices in the EU. The response was good and price data will be measured on 1 November 2001 and made available to the Commission not later than 15 January 2002. It should then be repeated half a year later. All the research will be published by a benchmarking section of the e-Europe website.
Although OECD analysis is limited, it gives an indication of the impact of unmetered access on the price of the Internet. The cost in September 2000 of unmetered access in the OECD report was – and here we use dollars because they use dollars, next year we will use euros – USD 25 in the UK, USD 35 in Spain and USD 50 in Germany. New figures from August 2001 show no notable variation in unmetered access prices. The USA remains at the lower end with USD 20. It is also clear from the benchmarking exercise, that unmetered access is growing rapidly in the EU. For example, provisional data from the Internet use survey shows that in June the proportion of households with unmetered ADSL access has increased by over 200% from last October's survey. The overall penetration of ADSL remains low, that is a fact, but there have been several spectacular advances in Member States, for example, Belgium went from 1% to 11% in the eight months separating the two surveys."@en1
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