A few days ago, OECD announced the state in which broadband is in around the globe. Not suprisingly, the Turkish telecommunication monopoly Türk Telekom is announced as providing the most expensive internet in the world with around $81US per Mbit/s. Japan has the cheapest with only $0.22US, yes, that is 22 cents compared to 81 dollars.
The reason for this is that Japan now uses fiber-optic lines, delivered to every home while most other countries, including Turkey, still use the traditional copper telephone wires. The Turkish infrastructure is especially outdated, with still ADSL being used instead of ADSL2+.
I can give a first hand example of how extreme the prices are.
During my college years in Canada, I was using Bell Sypmatico ADSL: 3Mbit/s (3000Kbit/s) downstream and 640Kbit/s upstream for around $55CAN ($53US, wow the dollar is cheap nowadays…).
At Ankara, Turkey I use the most basic Türk Telekom ADSL: 256Kbit/s downstream and 64Kbit/s upstream for 49YTL (which exchanges to about $39US at xe.com right now) with the next package of 512/128 Kbit/s being around $62US.
So the prices were around 7 times more expensive for me.
Here is a great video for the Turkish speakers out there which point out this price difference:
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