Broadband blues

“THE future is already here—it's just unevenly distributed,” a science-fiction writer, William Gibson, once joked. High-speed, or “broadband”, connections to the Internet are a case in point. Although there is a widespread view that broadband is the future of the Internet, figures compiled by the OECD reveal an astonishing variation in the adoption of broadband across the rich world (see chart). South Korea leads the table with 9.2 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants, compared with 2.25 in America and a measly 0.08 in Britain, despite the popularity of the Internet in all three countries.