Australia continues to fall behind most of the developed world when it comes to home broadband internet speeds.
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According to the Akamai State of the Internet Report, our internet connection speeds are now slower than 50 other nations, including Thailand, Estonia, Bulgaria and Kenya. Here's the full list of countries with better internet than Australia.
The Akamai State of the Internet Report is a quarterly analysis of internet connection speeds, network availability and IPv6 adoption progress around the world.
At the end of 2015, Australia was ranked 48th in the world. In the last quarter, we were down to 50th. Now, despite our average speeds increasing from 9.6Mbps to 10.1Mbps, we have dropped out of the Top 50 completely.
Here are the top 25 countries for average internet speeds, ranked from fastest to slowest:
- South Korea: 26.1Mbps
- Norway: 23.6Mbps
- Sweden: 22.817.3Mbps
- Hong Kong: 21.9Mbps
- Switzerland: 21.23Mbps
- Denmark: 20.7Mbps
- Finland 20.6Mbps
- Singapore: 20.2Mbps
- Japan: 19.6Mbps
- Netherlands: 17.6Mbps
- Latvia: 17.2Mbps
- Czech Republic: 17.3Mbps
- United States: 17.2Mbps
- United Kingdom: 16.3Mbps
- Romania: 16.1Mbps
- Belgium: 15.9Mbps
- Spain: 15.4Mbps
- Ireland: 15.3Mbps
- Taiwan: 15.6Mbps
- Bulgaria: 15.6Mbps
- Kenya: 15.0Mbps
- Lithuanian: 14.6Mbps
- Canada: 14.9Mbps
- Hungary: 14.3Mbps
- Germany: 14.6Mbps
On the plus side, Australia is leading the Asia-Pacific region in terms of mobile connectivity - our average mobile connection speed is 13.8Mbps, which is ahead of the Americas' region leader Canada (10.3Mbps). We are also well above the global average broadband speed of 7Mbps. This is despite having a far larger territory to cover and a lower population density than many countries on the list.
Nevertheless, our overall ranking compared to the rest of the world can only be described as a disappointment. In its original guise, the National Broadband Network promised to make us world leaders when it came to broadband technology. Instead, we're being bested by most developed Asia-Pacific nations including South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and New Zealand. Our 4Mbps+ broadband adoption rates were also the lowest in the region with a decline in adoption of 1.9 per cent.
With that said, Australia is still in the process of building the NBN. As Akamai notes: "Providing fast, reliable internet to a vast rural population of this scale is a challenge that no other country has to deal with. It's hard to compare Australia's speeds to a small and densely populated country like Singapore for example, where a single switch provides hundreds of thousands of people with Internet."
If the completed NBN rollout gets us anywhere near the region of 25 megabits per second, our rankings will improve accordingly. But for now, 51st place is a pretty poor showing.