Canada Trails Again

Losing hockey teams, frigid weather, Bieber Fever. Even before the Olympics, we thought that Canada needed help. Well, we hope for the sake of our North American neighbor that help doesn’t come through the World Wide Web.

According to a new study conducted by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Canada has some of the slowest and most expensive Internet services in the world.

However, according to a report released by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last year, Canada was a broadband leader based on the benchmark of penetration per 100 inhabitants, which indicates how many people have access to high-speed internet in their homes.

Although this isn’t unlike the usual Canadian perception of themselves (Canada also sees itself as a high performer in hockey, and we all know how that turned out), the Berkman Center for Internet & Society has said otherwise.

According to the Berkman report, "Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures."

Overall, Canada was ranked 19th worldwide, trailing the United States and the overall leaders—Sweden, Denmark and Japan.