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This month, Southeast Asians will find it much easier to surf the internet. A £300 million, 20,000 kilometre cable will be ready for service, offering higher speed broadband connections to Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

Southeast Asians have long suffered from slow connection speeds that have left them frustrated and less likely to shop online. The new cable will provide much-needed capacity, and faster, more reliable connectivity to sustain the massive growth in Asia’s online population, with a capability of delivering 960 gigabytes a second from each of its five fibre-optic lines. With the new Asia-America Gateway, as the fibre-optic cable is called, Southeast Asians will be much more likely to spend more time, and money, online.

The project was headed by Google and an international consortium, and took two years. The resulting pipe that spans from Los Angeles to Japan is 6,200 miles in length.

But they didn’t stop there: Google has just recently signed a second deal with a group of telecommunications firms to connect Southeast Asia with the world’s fastest undersea fibre-optic line. The line has a design capacity of 17 terabytes per second (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes). This second project is expected to be completed by 2012.

A recent Swedish report “When local becomes global” revealed that there has been an increase in Scandinavians shopping on foreign websites. These results were obtained by interviewing 2000 consumers in Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

According to investigations by the centre for Swedish commerce, Swedes spend 500 million SEK on goods from foreign online sites during 2008, and this year it is expected that this figure will have risen to a staggering 750 million SEK by the end of the year.

In terms of the items people shop for on the foreign sites, they’re similar to the goods bought on Swedish sites, with books, magazines, CDs, clothes, home electronics and computers being the top sellers.

In total, purchases from foreign sites comprise approximately five percent of online purchases in Sweden, thus, shopping from Swedish sites is still much more common. Reasons for choosing Swedish sites above foreign sites include a fear of problems with deliveries, potential toll charges, and reluctance to provide card details.

British sites are most popular among the global Swedish shoppers, with German sites being the second most popular. The number of people admitting to never have shopped from a foreign website has decreased from 48 percent to 43 percent over the last year.

Germans spent around €250 million (£224 million) on downloads this year, according to the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, BITKOM. This represents an 18 percent increase from 2008.

Downloading music, games, videos, audio books or software has never been so popular. The number of legal downloads has been expected to have continued rising to around 60 million by the end of 2009 – an increase of 24 percent in comparison to 2008.

The vice-president of BITKOM, Achim Berg, is convinced the growth will also remain strong for 2010. He sees it as a result of both the wide range of choices on offer and decreasing prices. Between January and September 2009, the average dowload cost €4.10 (£3.67). Last year, the average cost of a download during this time was €4.34 (£3.91).

Faster internet access and the increase in the number of households with internet connections have also contributed to this boom.