A test of broadband speeds across 189 countries has found that Australia ranks 55th, well behind table-topper Singapore and even behind Kenya (51) and the Bahamas (49).
Speeds were measured by how long it took to download a 7.5GB film file.
Singapore came in at number one, where the file was downloaded in 18 minutes and 34 seconds with an average download speed of 55.13 megabits per second (Mbps). In Australia, it took two hours, 12 minutes and 57 seconds to download the file at an average speed of 7.7Mbps.
There were 28 countries that were able to download the file in under an hour, including the Czech Republic (26th) and Slovakia (23rd) and 52 countries were able to download the file in under two hours, including New Zealand (30th) and the Bahamas (49th).
The Kiwis had more than double the mean download speed of Australia with 16.6Mbps, and Australia was even behind Kenya, where they managed an average download speed of 8.83Mbps.
British broadband advice site cable.co.uk compiled data from more than 63 million broadband speed tests across 12 months in partnership with New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab and other partners.
“This data set has been queried for tests run in the year to 10 May 2017; in order to compile a league table of download speeds for countries, tests have been performed by at least 100 unique IP addresses,” according to the outline of the methodology.
Australia has been steadily falling further down this list, even as the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) continues.
NBN providers have been flooded by complaints from customers saying their connections are much slower than the speeds they previously enjoyed. One customer is receiving speeds up to 1/100 of what he believes he has paid for.
“As everyone else, I am getting 1 per cent (1 megabit per second or even less) of contracted speed (100Mbps) during peak times,” said the user. “After searching around I could see this is really a common Optus problem all around the country.”
Another user added: “Simply put, they (telcos) don’t purchase enough bandwidth from the NBN. They buy enough for 10 people but sell it to 100 people, so at peak times it’s useless.”
What do you think? Do we deserve faster internet speeds? Is this what you expected as the NBN started to be connected? What speeds do you get at home?
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