A country without fast broadband will raise losers without professions, instead of manufacturing a domestic car.

Turkey still lags behind in terms of fast broadband access, which is neither prevalent nor cheap. It is relatively better compared to in the past, but still insufficient. Have you ever thought what it means not to have fast broadband access to the Internet? A country which lacks fast broadband access cannot manufacture domestic cars. Nor can it make innovations. All of it is empty talk. Fast Internet connections tie societies and countries together. Those who cannot surf the Internet at high connection speeds are and will be losers. Today let me talk about this.

The favorite phrase among kids nowadays is loser. I heard the phrase first from my nephew Sarp, who turned seven this year. When I was a kid, we did not use such an expression. Now, however, this concept takes shapes in their minds when they are little. This was not the case when I was a kid. Or I have forgotten as time has passed. Anyway, I find this expression quite useful in explaining my point. Let me use the word “loser” in a sentence.

Have you ever checked Turkey’s ranking in broadband Internet subscriptions? Please check: The OECD has a comprehensive database on this (the OECD broadband portal). The number of broadband subscribers in Turkey is around 7 million. The US has 85 million. We can argue that the large difference has to do with the population of the US. Korea, which has a population similar to that of Turkey, however, has 17.5 million broadband subscribers. If you think the number of subscribers is not a good indicator of prevalence of Internet usage, we can look at the ratio of households with broadband access. In Korea, 97.5 percent of households have broadband access. Recently in the New York Times, I came across a project devoted to increasing the ratio for the US. As the 2010 data suggest, the ratio for Turkey is 34 percent, an increase from 17 percent in 2007. Though impressive, however, this is not sufficient. Poland, which rivals Turkey in size, has improved the percentage of households with broadband access from 29 percent in 2007 to 59 percent in 2010.  In other words, such improvement can be observed throughout the world.

Now let’s take a look at the price of broadband access. Turkey performs badly in terms of prices, too. The experts on the issue have told me that analyzing whether the price of access has been decreasing is more important than analyzing the level of access. The position of Turkey is still bad. The average monthly subscription price for fast connection is 78 dollars in Turkey and 46 dollars in Korea. The prices for the same subscription (faster than 45 Mbs) are 55 dollars in Poland, 50 dollars in France and 58 dollars in Germany. So, here is what I see: Turkey is the country with the least prevalent and most expensive Internet access compared to the countries in the European Union. This is bad.

Why? Why will those who do not have fast access continue to be losers? What does “loser” refer to here? Here is the definition of loser: programmers in a country that does not have fast access to the Internet work for lower wages. They connect to the world economy via an unpaved road instead of a highway. They earn less. Four programmers who graduated from the same university will earn different wages in the US, Turkey, Korea and Palestine: the one with the worst Internet connection will earn the least. The wage of a programmer per hour will be the lowest in the country with the worst broadband access. The table below shows the daily wages for programmers from different countries.

One cannot produce a domestic car with empty talk. A country without fast broadband subscription will raise losers without professions, instead of manufacturing a domestic car. Those with slow Internet connection are losers. This is the rule of the present era. Sorry to say that.

Table: Daily Wage for Software Programming (US$)

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 31.01.2012