Finland, the first country in the world to enforce broadband as a legal right for every citizen, introduced the law on the 1st of July this year.

Each and every Finn now has the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection, but the country has also pledged to connect every citizen to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.

Finland’s promise is very different to the one offered by the UK Government which has proposed a minimum connection of at least 2 Mbps to all homes by 2012. In contrast, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has not expressed a wish to make this a right in law.

The law in Finland now means that telecommunications companies are obliged to provide all residents with broadband lines that can run at a minimum 1 Mbps speed.

Finland has worked hard over the last few years to create what is calls an ‘information society’ and it is believed that up to 96% of the population are already online with only 4,000 homes that will need connecting to comply with the law.

In comparison, the percentage of the population that are currently online in the UK stands at 73%.

Interestingly, a poll conducted for the BBC World Service earlier this year found that almost four in five people around the world believed that access to the internet is a fundamental right.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Business Broadband, Telecommunications News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.