Romania has 2 major ISP's, one that has always been very innovative, forward-thinking, has kept prices as low as possible (100 Mbps, unlimited data, for $13 a month, in pretty much any urban area in the country, and even some rural ones), and the other who used to be the landline/dial-up monopoly, but right now are playing catch-up to the other one a bit, but still doing pretty well.
We're still waiting for carriers to start adopting LTE in Europe, though, and it probably won't happen until 2014 or so. Hopefully, they'll jump straight to LTE Advanced by then.
I'm living in Romania now and can confirm this. My friends in Germany can only dream about such uplinks. Internetwise, Germany feels like a Second World Country for me now. The rds founder seems like a very smart man. I never met him but I like him already :)
Let's see if Cluj can continue to build and hold the startup scene there.
I second that. I'm going from Germany every August to Romania and it feels like going to Internet Worderland.
Cabletv + 100mbs unlimited for 8 euros, prepaid 3G cards with 5000mins+internet a 5euros, lots of free wireless. Not to mention the cool operator Zapp ( based on EVDO ), had 2Mbps in on a isolated mountain summit!
Meanwhile in Germany pretty much is a hindrance, beginning with DSL ( i hate the uplink ). Not to mention that Vodafone Germany is billing 3g internet like is made of gold.
The first thing I've wondered about was "how come smaller countries (with possible only one ISP) aren't on top"? For City-states as Andorra, San-Marino, Monaco or Vatican, that figure can jump from 0 to 100 right away. As for Buthan... I didn't knew they had any IT infrastructure!
Well, it's the unfortunate result of several trends colliding: little economic opportunity for the youth of the 'lost generations' of the '90s, a largely well educated population, leaning a lot towards technical subjects, cheap internet access, knowledge of the English language, and wide spread regard for laws as guides rather than rigid rules.
A funny story. When Bill Gates came to Romania to launch their Microsoft branch here, and before he gave his speech, the president (still in power now) made a "joke" about how pirating Windows has helped Romania tremendously in the IT sector over the years. I'm not a big fan of the president, but to say that before the founder of Microsoft and before a crowd (and on TV, too), takes a lot of guts.
As someone who's been watching these statistics obsessively for a while now, the most impressive part is how fast Romania's risen - they've gone from zero to 6% in literally a couple of months.
Unfortunately the article doesn't expand much useful information beyond the title...
TL;DR:
> According to Google statistics, Romania leads the way with a 6.55% adoption rate, followed by France with 4.67%. Japan is on the third place so far with 1.57% but it seems here “users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.”
22 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadWe're still waiting for carriers to start adopting LTE in Europe, though, and it probably won't happen until 2014 or so. Hopefully, they'll jump straight to LTE Advanced by then.
Let's see if Cluj can continue to build and hold the startup scene there.
Meanwhile in Germany pretty much is a hindrance, beginning with DSL ( i hate the uplink ). Not to mention that Vodafone Germany is billing 3g internet like is made of gold.
EDIT: formatting
TL;DR: > According to Google statistics, Romania leads the way with a 6.55% adoption rate, followed by France with 4.67%. Japan is on the third place so far with 1.57% but it seems here “users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.”