The infrastructure of broadband is developing quite differently in the United States and Europe, for a technology that predominates in one European country may barely exist in another. This fact has implications for both consumers and providers of broadband services.

Who gets what, for example, will depend partly on the infrastructure already in place. In the United States, cable has a clear advantage in providing broadband access for residential customers because 70 percent of households there already subscribe to it; only 28 percent of Western European households do.¹ In Europe, wireless technologies will play a much greater role in delivering broadband. Already, 30 million Western European households (compared with only 11 million in the United States) receive satellite services that could be migrated to interactive broadband services. Likewise, Europe’s mobile-phone subscriber base has grown from 96 million people in 1998 to more than 156 million in 1999—all of them potential subscribers to next-generation mobile broadband services. That is an average penetration rate of 41 percent, compared with 80 million subscribers and a penetration rate of 31 percent in the United States.

So broadband providers will have to adjust their lines of attack to the peculiarities of the countries...