Internet Access and Usage in Bulgaria

This is part of a presentation I made in Johannesburg, South Africa, earlier this year, at the iWeek. I’ve added some recent data after that.

What is interesting, is the way Bulgaria has developed its Internet access. Yesterday I saw some interesting information, which is good to use comparing it to the access in the USA. You may be shocked reading it.
“High speed Internet access” and “Net neutrality” are two of the most common used terms in the USA, but also all over the world. My presentation is about the access.

Amazingly, the high-speed Internet access is not high-speed in the USA. The country where the Internet was created, believes that high speed is as follows:

• Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner or Earthlink’s: up to 5-8 Mbps downstream and up to 384 Kbps upstream ($ 60 / month)
• Verizon’s Internet: DSL download speeds up to 3 Mbps ($ 30 / month)

When they say “up to”, that means you may not be able to get this speed often…

At the same time in Bulgaria speed and prices are like this:

• 15 USD plan: 10 Mbps to Bulgaria, 1.5 Mbps abroad
• 30 USD plan: 20 Mbps / 3 Mbps
• 40 USD plan: 25 Mbps / 3.5 Mbps

All plans include 100 Mbps access to a huge network of thousands of users. This you can not get in the US, and certainly not at this price. People who still use dial-up, can do it for free.

Here’s how the Bulgarians use Internet:

ADSL – 11 %
LAN – 55 %
cable tv – 24 %
dial-up – 10 %

Today in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, there are hundreds of Internet Service Providers. In New York there are basically two – Time Warner Cable (which offers two services), and Verizon. Instead of monopoly, we have bi-poly. And no wonder their prices are more or less similar. And the customer has no choice!
You may see also another older article by me, on the same topic, here.
Here’s the presentation itself – in ODP (18 Kb. You will need the free OpenOffice.org, recommended) and in PPT (98 Kb, you will need MS Office, costs a lot) format.

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P.S. For a couple of days the permalinks were not working – I changed their structure, but then I travelled and didn’t have time to fix it. That’s why I published all the articles, without the need to click on “read more”. As of today, all is working fine.