A new report published today by The Economist Intelligence Unit finds that progress in providing faster broadband access varies significantly across South-East Asia, despite the economic opportunities being well acknowledged.

There are great differences in the level of broadband planning and implementation, where even leaders, such as Singapore and Malaysia, face challenges in achieving greater coverage and uptake. In Singapore, 95% of households have access to fiber to the home (FTTH) network speed and 46% of them have subscribed to it. In Myanmar, by contrast, there is not even a national broadband plan. Among those with a plan for development, implementation is uneven.

This is among the key findings of The future of broadband in South-East Asia, an Economist Intelligence Unit report commissioned by Huawei. Although the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ ICT Masterplan 2015 maps out a strategy to achieve greater integration across six areas, including infrastructure development and bridging the digital divide, implementation remains a domestic issue. In Malaysia, for instance, broadband targets are based on speeds of 256Kbps with the aim to provide 10Mbps or greater to high economic impact areas. The government has set a target to increase the broadband penetration rate to 75% of households by 2015.

Mobile-broadband has been touted as a quick way to provide broader access, but experts are now concluding that it is not a silver bullet. Conversion of spectrum allocation, the necessary technical development to provide faster mobile speeds, has been slow across much of the region. Even where successful policies are in place, such as in Singapore, limited bandwidth for data poses an emerging challenge. This highlights the continued importance of fixed broadband networks to supplement increasingly crowded mobile networks.

The report also finds that, in order not to fall behind, regulators are now taking a more holistic perspective and working with industry to resolve such issues and promote strong infrastructure environments.

As the information society grows in importance, digital inclusiveness becomes more urgent. Yet reaching rural and vulnerable populations remains difficult even for leading countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. Cyber security has also emerged as an issue which can affect uptake.

Despite the financial and practical challenges of broadband implementation, it remains the easier part of the supply and demand equation. More difficult are the challenges of improving affordability and raising awareness of the benefits of broadband adoption. Countries are only now beginning to tackle these issues. 

The ICT Globalisation Index is a quantitative ranking of the degree of globalisation of national ICT sectors. The ranking comprises more than 25 indicators across four thematic categories: openness to ICT trade, openness to foreign investment in the ICT sector, R&D globalisation, and strength of the ICT environment.