Two pieces of news caught my eye recently. The first was Cable & Wireless Communications (trading as Flow in Barbados) partnering with the Government of Barbados to provide 1,000 low-income families with access to high speed Internet. The second was the release of the Broadband Affordability Index by Broadband Genie (a UK entity). The latter compared Internet bills to average salaries across 132 countries worldwide. In this post, I look at how Caribbean countries rank against each other.
The first step was to copy and paste the raw data into Excel. From there, some basic cleaning, formatting, currency conversion (Pounds to USD), and filtering was performed. Once that was done, I turned my attention to Caribbean countries, which for the purpose of this post I define as member states and associate members of CARICOM.
As per CARICOM’s website, member states are as follows: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago (15). Associate Members are as follows: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands (5). This gives us a total of 20.
Broadband Genie’s report did not include data on all CARICOM countries. Their methodology provides further information on this with countries with low population values (Montserrat and St. Kitts & Nevis for example), insufficient data, and unreliable exchange rates being excluded.
As such, of the 20 countries (members and associate members), data was only available for 11 consisting of 10 member states, and 1 associate member state as per the table below and chart below:
