The other day I fell over this interesting report published by ITIF called Explaining International Broadband Leadership (108 pages 3MB PDF) that listed USA and 30 OECD countries and their broadband usage and the report came to numerous conclusions and advice why the US is falling behind in the ranks and so on. Quite interesting read in general.

In their ranking table, Sweden is listed at #6. I immediately noticed the column called “Household penetration” (subscribers per household). Hm, isn’t that the amount of households that have broadband? It says 0.54 for Sweden. 54% broadband users among the households 2007?

We have this organization in Sweden called “Statistiska CentralbyrÃ¥n” in Swedish and “Statistics Sweden” in english. They basically work with gathering and presenting statistics on Sweden and Swedish related matters. They’ve produced a huge report (in Swedish – 1MB, 256 pages PDF) called “Private citizens’ use of computers and internet 2007” (my translation). They mention that during spring 2007, 71% of the Swedes used broadband internet from their homes. (Over 80% had internet access in their homes, which makes 12% of the users not using broadband…)

Isn’t there a shockingly huge difference between 54 and 71? And this is just a quick number I could check myself for my country. How off is then the other countries’ values? The ITIF report doesn’t even try to describe how they got their numbers so it isn’t easy to see how they got this. The Swedish report does in fact also contain a comparison with other European countries, and the numbers shown for them don’t match the ones in the ITIF report either! (But the order of top broadband using countries is roughly the same.)

I’m also a bit curious on how they got the numbers for the “average download speed in Mbps” column, but I don’t have any numbers to cross-check for that.