Canada still presents itself as an Internet leader even though it now offers substandard web access compared to other countries, a study of world online systems has concluded.

“Though it was among the first nations in the world to provide widespread, retail broadband service, Canada’s recent development has lagged behind other nations,” a 333-page Harvard University study says.

Canadian Internet providers denounced the study as wrong and based on faulty data.

The study, published this month by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said Canadian Internet systems are slow, expensive and tied up by a government strategy “that has mostly focused on connecting unconnected areas and not on increasing capacity at the higher end.”

“Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband,” the study said. “This is no longer a realistic picture.”

The country is also positioned badly for the future, it said. Canada “is even weaker in 3G wireless service than fixed broadband, with its growth of subscriptions among the slowest in the industrialized world.”

Telus Inc. spokesman Jim Johannsson said his company doesn’t advertise its 100 megabit per second services because they’re available only to high-rise apartments and condos. The Berkman study instead used their high-speed radio service Wimax rates, he said, which are expensive and used only in rural areas.

“They figured the average Canadians is paying $189 per month” for their Internet service, Johannsson said. “The real truth is $35 to $45 a month.”

“The Berkman authors systematically discarded evidence that didn’t fit with the preconceived policy framework it elected to promote,” contended Rogers Communications Inc. vice-president Jan Innes. Videotron, she said, is a “world leader in launching ultra-high-speed Internet services.”

Bell Canada senior vice-president Mirko Bibic said the study “is widely regarded as out of date” and “threatens Canada’s broadband progress by discouraging private investment.”

That was the message as well that the largest U.S. Internet service providers sent Monday to the Federal Communications Commission, for whom the Berkman study was done. Putting them more clearly under the agency’s jurisdiction, they warned, could stop them from investing in their broadband networks.

Study author P.I. Yochai Benkler in November had delivered a point-by-point rebuttal to criticism of Berkman’s first draft.

“Almost no Canadian home can tap the ultra-fast speeds offered by, say, fibre-to-the-home services, which are available in 44 per cent of Japanese households. Canada ranks with Poland, Hungary and Mexico as laggards in the availability of 3G.”

As for the OECD data, Benkler said, “We used our own independent analysis as well as OECD data and other sources where those seemed better.” The data, he said, “was substantially better than the critics would have you believe.”

Benkler also pointed out the study used per-households numbers as well as per 100 people.

Early Internet successes in Canada were admirable, the study said. Cable and DSL services have been available in at least some parts of Canada since 1996, when SaskTel became one of the world’s first telecommunications carriers to offer it.

Around the same time, Rogers premiered the first high-speed cable Internet service in the world. By the end of 2008, broadband was available to almost all city households in Canada, the study said.

Now, however, Canadians using fibre optics to access the Internet make up just 0.01 per cent of the country’s broadband subscribers, compared with 39 per cent in Korea, 44 per cent in Japan and 20 per cent in Sweden, the study said.

However, Telus’s Johannsson said a comparison with Japan is impossible because most Japanese people live in high-density apartments more easily provided with high-speed Internet, while more Canadians live in single-family homes,

Although Rogers, Bell and Shaw have announced plans for fibre-optic services, their prime targets are condos, apartments and hotels. Five companies (Rogers, Bell, Shaw, Telus and Videotron) control roughly 81 per cent of the broadband market.

“The highest prices for the lowest speeds are mostly offered by firms in the United States and Canada” where markets are built around one company that owns a telephone system and another that owns a cable system, it said.

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“In speed, Canada is a weak to midpack performer.” Carriers such as Bell that provide infrastructure for other services can impose bandwidth caps, it said.

Canada persists with its dusty myth of Internet superiority, the study said. A Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission August, 2009, report makes “a self-congratulatory reference” to Canada having the highest Internet penetration of G7 countries. Factually true, said the study, but that ignores its poor numbers on speed and price and its poor performance against non-G7 countries such as South Korea.

The Harvard study was designed to give the U.S. Federal Communications Commission ammunition to craft a “next generation” connectivity policy. By relying on existing cable and telephone companies to provide competition, it said, Canada is in a weak position for the future.