If you’re reading this whilst enjoying the blazing-fast speeds that a fiber-optic internet connection can offer, then you are part of a growing percentage of high-speed users around the world. According to new statistics released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), fiber-optic internet connections enjoyed a sizable rise in popularity in developed countries during 2013.
The OECD monitors economic trends in a number of developed areas of the world such as North America, Australia, Europe, and Japan; the current trend in internet connectivity has seen a 13.9% spike in fiber-optic subscriptions within a year. This burst in interest towards a relatively new kind of internet connection has lead the OECD to conclude that as many as 15.8% of all broadband connections in the surveyed areas are fiber-optic.
Whilst different countries obviously showed a wide variety in fiber-optic growth throughout the year, Mexico proved to be the nation with the biggest growth in high-speed internet connection. Over 12 months of observation, the OECD noted a surge of 290% in Mexican fiber-optic internet connections, whilst the US market expanded by only 12% during the same year.
The countries with the highest rate of fiber-optic penetration is actually Japan, which leads the globe with a 68.5% penetration of the high-speed internet connection, followed closely by South Korea with 62.8% and Sweden with 35.9%. By contrast, fiber-optic broadband only accounts for 7.7% of internet connections in the United States.
