BW #82: Broadband

When we bought our apartment in 1999, Modi'in was called Israel's "city of the future." Never mind the silly tagline; even then, we had a number of features that did make it more modern (futuristic?) than many others: Underground power and phone lines, planned neighborhoods, lots of parks, and fiber-optic Internet service to every house.

Of course, things are never quite as good as they say, and this turned out to be particularly true regarding the fiber-optic Internet service. It seems that the people who installed the fiber hadn't coordinated with the phone company, which used incompatible connectors. And so, for more than 25 years, the fiber has sat underground, completely unusable.

Fortunately, a number of other Internet service providers have been installing fiber, and earlier this year, we joined the high-speed Internet club. And -- I have to say that it's pretty great to have uploads and downloads work so quickly and well.

Of course, not everywhere in the world is so lucky to have easy access to broadband. (And the fact that we can choose from several competing companies is a nice bonus.) During the pandemic, we heard stories about children in the United States who didn't have Internet access at home, and who thus did schoolwork from their cars outside of Internet-enabled public libraries or McDonald's. It became clear that many Americans didn't have sufficiently good Internet service.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_Jobs_Act), spearheaded by the Biden Administration, is making a lot of money available for high-speed Internet. I learned a lot about how this money is being used on an excellent three-part series, "Breaking Ground," that Marketplace broadcast last week (https://www.marketplace.org/collection/breaking-ground/). I didn't expect to be so interested in what it means to put fiber in eastern Kentucky, but it was surprisingly interesting.

I went looking for data about fiber-optic Internet service in the US, and came up empty handed. However, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has tracked broadband Internet service across its member states, allowing us to see where countries stand relative to one another on high-speed Internet access. The data is only current through the fourth quarter of 2023, but we can still see some pretty clear (and perhaps obvious) trends regarding the growth of broadband in various countries.

Data and six questions

This week's data, as I wrote above, comes from the OECD's extensive data about broadband (https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/broadband-statistics.html). I decided to focus on broadband penetration rates, which we can download from:

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/broadband-statistics/data/1-5-fixed-and-mobile-broadband-penetration.xls

This Excel file contains two sheets, one for fixed broadband and one for mobile.

Here are my six tasks and questions. As always, I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions, including a downloadable Jupyter notebook:

• Create two data frames, one with fixed broadband info, and the other with mobile broadband info, taken from the two sheets of the Excel file. Ignore the row with overall OECD information. The country names should be the data frame's columns, and the quarters should be the rows. Combine the two data frames into a single, multi-indexed data frame
• Turn the data frames' indexes (containing the quarters) into datetime values, choosing the final date of the named quarter.