I do feel pressure to support the local hosting market, but for anything but the lightest web-hosting it won’t be cost-effective. With some of the cheapest electricity in the world, you’d expect the hosting market to be competitive, but bandwidth costs are way too high.

We live in hope that new undersea cables and telecoms deregulation will change things.

Michael: The above URL provides the most generally accepted definition. As the cold-war has ended the definition has changed a little, so it’s now about economic success and standard of living rather than not being Communist.

I expect that a country which has a successful economy and a reasonable amount of resources to devote to leisure will get some reasonable sort of net access as it is a fun toy. Also while this post only covered the IT issues related to net access, there are obvious ways that most businesses can be more successful with better net access.

So it seems to me that to a certain extent development of net access and development of the economy are linked.

Also the most critical parts of the net work fine at modem speeds. If you want to exchange email and do some light web browsing then a modem will work just as well now as it did in 1993. But if you want to view flash based web sites, exchange videos, host a modern web site, etc then you need a lot more.

Does the phrase ‘first-world countr[y]‘ apply to a country with severely restricted Internet access? Or – is world class Internet access a necessary precondition to the status of ‘first-world countr[y]‘?

It’s interesting to me, because I’m thinking that the Internet is such that it may not matter – that because of the location-independent nature of networks, you can have restricted bandwidth, but still be ‘first world’.

As for content filtering though, I’d think the opposite.

–Mike

So you get 1 TB of traffic on a virtual server for like 10 Euro. That is the cheapest I know in any country.

Same thing with ADSL. We used to have capped offers, but now the english word “flatrate” is used for advertising. So everybody is providing real flatrates, or people will yell .. And now all the providers don’t seem to care that much about torrents running all day on 16mbit down/1mbit up connections.
Cheapest offer so far is digital cable TV+VOIP landline with a flatrate for german calls (except cells) + 10 mbit internet(only downstream) connection for 25 Euro. Still not Japan, but really cheap nonetheless.

And our crazy government often get their Stasi/Gestapo-like laws forbidden by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. (Data retention and FBI-like law are still in the process of being forbidden, I hope.)

I am not happy about the post 9/11 world, but maybe it isn’t as bad in Germany as I often think it is..