At some point in the next 48 hours, I’ll be leaving this house, and more importantly, leaving the cable modem that’s served me nicely for the last 4 years. It’s 256Kbps, which is not great these days, but it works, costs less than 15 UKP per month, and was available months before anywhere in the UK (except Hull) got any kind of broadband access, and years before the majority of UK citizens were able to ditch their modems.

Now the UK has caught up a bit, but Brazil is still closer to broadband rich countries like Canada and South Korea than the UK is to it. Rio de Janeiro has almost city-wide wireless access.

How did this happen? How did the world’s fourth largest economy get beaten by the ninth? The answer is obviously complicated, but I think it boils down to monopolies being far worse for an economy than you could possibly imagine, and the fact that Brazil has more than a hundred million people living in essentially abject poverty. A large pool of extremely cheap labour is very useful for making the rich minority richer. Here’s to slave-installed broadband.