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On July, 5th 2010, the Applied Research and Communications Fund presented its conclusions and recommendations toward the national and European policies on broadband development during a discussion on Digital Agenda for Europe, organized by the European Commission Representation in Bulgaria. This policy brief is part of e-Bulgaria 2020 initiative, which aims at providing analysis on state-of-the-art and future developments if information society in Bulgaria.
Public policies toward broadband development must be focused on the specifics of individual countries through establishing mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation of these specifics, in addition to existing methods for collection and comparative analysis of macro-statistical indicators that are universal for all member states. The effectiveness of public policies in this area is largely dependent on the availability of timely and reliable data on current state-of-the-art and the attitudes of individuals and businesses toward using the innovative opportunities that broadband offer. European policies in this area (including the Digital Agenda for Europe) are based on standard structural indicators for the use and penetration of information and communication technologies in business and the population and on a limited number of internationally comparable data based on specialized studies. The main indicators are based on the economic, political, and technological developments in EU15. This leads to prioritizing only selected characteristics and often underestimating the specifics of new member states that are key to their economic growth, technological progress, and social development.
The recent studies on the use and penetration of broadband internet in the European Union underlined that some of the new EU member states show entirely different patterns in choosing broadband technologies. Compared to older member states, the deployment of fixed broadband lines in Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania (and to a lesser extent in Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) is much more based on fiber access.
According to a study on the broadband deployment in Bulgaria carried out in Q1 2010 by the Applied Research and Communications Fund, 91.5% of the population lives in areas with at least one ISP, which offers broadband internet (providing a connection faster than 1 Mbps priced at BGN 30 per month). The considerable fragmentation of broadband internet market contributes to a higher competition and the latter could explain the fact that prices for providing broadband fixed lines in Bulgaria are among the lowest in the EU. As a result, Bulgaria and Portugal are forerunners in the EU in terms of their share of broadband lines (about 60% compared to an average of 23% for EU27), offering access at 10+Mbps speed.
The development of specific technological and business models in deployment of broadband technologies and services and the wide use of these models in areas with varying urbanization, economic, and social characteristics facilitate the subsequent transfer of these models to other countries. Most of the major ISPs in Bulgaria have their own R&D units operating in two main areas – a) technological development and upgrade of infrastructure and b) convergence and the introduction of bundled services. These ISPs are often early adopters of new innovative technologies in Europe.
