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Transparency International's transparency index measures each country in the world on corruption. See how they compare by clicking on each country. Use the dropdown menu to see how scores have changed since 2008

British households download about 17 gigabytes of data on average every month over their home broadband connections, suggests a report.

Open government initiatives are either aimed at providing greater transparency, usually as a reaction to an accusation or perception of excessive secrecy, or at engaging citizens in specific problem solution as well as service delivery. It is probably fair to say that the US federal initiatives are closer to the former, while UK initiatives are closer to the latter. In both cases, though, there is a fundamental lack of confidence - or blatant distrust - in the government workforce. This is rooted in a mixture of reality and perception: laziness, risk aversion, self-preservation, lack of incentives, low salaries, a culture of job security, and so forth, do not contribute to creating a pretty picture of government employees. In countries that are struggling with their finances and economy, civil servants are seen as a cost to be reduced in order to recover resources that should help reignite the economy. At the same time many agree that the retirement or dismissal of experienced government workers may make the situation even worse in areas where government services will be in greater demand going forward (think about education, social care, health care, public safety).

Broadband is vital to the economic and social sustainability of rural communities. Ensuring the availability of fast and reliable access in all rural communities is a key priority for Defra and we are working closely with DCMS, which has overall responsibility for broadband policy and delivery. Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) is responsible for managing the broadband rollout programme, and government funding of £530m for rural broadband to 2015.

We in the UK are getting very much the same argument as you in the US are: high speed broadband is terribly important and thus there should be subsidies, mandates, perhaps a large government led and paid for program to make sure that it's available everywhere. However, the truth seems to be that high speed broadband doesn't actually matter very much.

A German cable operator, Kabel Deutschland (KD), claims to have become the "first" in the world to "successfully achieve" a broadband download speed of 4700Mbps (Megabits per second) during one of their real world field tests (more bandwidth than many current PC and laptops could process).

"What happens in Vegas, no longer stays in Vegas - soon it will be all over the Internet. The 24/7 casino mentality that you only used to find along the Vegas Strip is coming to a social network near you. Within the UK, Facebook is already hard at work, making sure that online gambling will become a staple of your online social networking experience, alongside other virtual time sinks like FarmVille. Instead of spending your virtual cash on FarmVille farm animals, why not drop some real cash on Bingo Friendzy and meet some new friends within Facebook's new online Bingo Hall?"

"In May 2012 OFCOM undertook extensive research into domestic broadband speeds and discovered an apparent average user speed across the UK of a healthy 9 Mb per second. This is a massive 2.5 times faster than the average residential broadband speeds recorded in a similar OFCOM study in 2008 of some 3.6 Mb per second. However as ever with statistics, you need to understand the data behind the figures to draw much in the way of conclusions. How do these statistics manifest themselves to the end user using fixed line broadband services?"

"Selon Richard Hammell, associé à Deloitte Analytics UK, » certaines organisations pensent qu' « ouvrir » signifie tout publier, mais ce n'est pas le cas. Les entreprises sont libres de choisir les données qu'elles publient, comme celles qui peuvent aider leurs client à mieux trouver, comparer et comprendre leurs produits et services. Pour de nombreux groupes, le compromis est positif, stimule la croissance et mène à une concurrence plus équitable. Tirer parti de cette opportunité unique peut améliorer l'innovation et l'ingéniosité au sein des entreprises« ."

The future of the UK Broadband landscape had its last major change in 2009 when the Digital Britain report was published, and the current BDUK projects are the visible legacy from that report. A House of Lords Select Committee was created in early 2012 to report on the progress of Superfast service roll-outs in the United Kingdom, and a large batch of evidence was released in April 2012. Now the final report entitled Broadband for all - an alternative vision has been published, and we have gone through the report to see what changes are proposed.

The global broadband revolution is in full swing and across the planet we are seeing people logging on the internet with faster and faster connections. It is new economies that are among the fastest. What is most astonishing - laggards like India & UK going zoom zoom.

Our future will be connected. Humanity is in the process of transitioning into a world in which we can be better understood as a richly connected collective than a set of individuals. Connectivity will drive our prosperity, both economic and social. Recognising this, governments around the world are all seeking to provide increased bandwidth and speed to their populations at the moment. What they can't agree on is which part of that process should be prioritised: the current debate in Britain over the choice between breadth of access and speed is a case in point.

My slidedeck for a keynote presentation given at PELeCON 2012 in Plymouth UK, on April 19, 2012