Broadband Speeds: How SA compares

South Africa is well below world standards, but fares well against African counterparts

The University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics recently released the results of their Broadband Quality Study, a project which set out to establish where countries feature in terms of broadband quality, and whether they are on the right side of the digital divide.

The study found that the overall average broadband quality had increased across the globe.  The average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Megabits per second (Mbps) while the average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps.  The global average for latency decreased by 21% to 170 milliseconds.

Thirty nine countries have a broadband quality above the threshold required to deliver a consistent quality of experience for the most common web applications today, such as social networking, streaming low-definition video, web communications and sharing small files such as photos and music.

The Middle East and Africa had the worst broadband quality score of all regions, and South Africa was no exception.  South Africa’s Broadband Quality Score (BQS) – calculated using download, upload and latency values - is 21, significantly lower than the international average of 31.  SA finished 60th out of the 66 countries surveyed.

South Africa’s score means that it is well below the ‘applications threshold’, indicating that local Internet users are not well equipped to take advantage of the most common web applications available on the Internet.

This survey made use of the Speedtest.net statistics to compare regions and countries, and it may be instructive to analyze the most recent results to see exactly how South Africa compares to the rest of the world in terms of broadband performance.

Highest broadband speeds

Korea and Japan unsurprisingly had the highest broadband speeds, but what is less expected is that the Aland Islands, Lithuania and Latvia completed the top 5.

South Korea, with an average downlink speed of 21.85 Mbps, reigned supreme in terms of broadband performance, followed by Japan with 16.08 Mbps and the Aland Islands with 14.91 Mbps.  Lithuania came in fourth with 13.5 Mbps and Latvia was fifth with 13.46 Mbps.

For upload speeds the same countries made the top 5 (with the exception of South Korea which is replaced by Bulgaria), albeit with a different order.  Here Lithuania performed the best with an average uplink speed of 8.97 Mbps, followed by Japan with 7.2Mbps, Bulgaria with 5.65 Mbps, Latvia with 5.34 Mbps and the Aland Islands with 5.22 Mbps.

Broadband per continent

Europe reigned supreme as the continent with the highest broadband speeds, with an average downlink speed of 6.66 Mbps and an average uplink speed of 1.46 Mbps.   North America was second with a download speed of 6.26 Mbps and upload speed of 1.39 Mbps followed by Australasia with speeds of 4.91 Mbps and 0.65 Mbps respectively. 

Asia was fourth with download and upload speeds of 4.43 Mbps and 1.78 Mbps respectively, with South America fifth with 2.01 Mbps and 0.41 Mbps and Africa last with 1.18 Mbps and 0.28 Mbps. 

South Africa’s performance

When it came to Africa, local broadband services performed better.  South Africa’s average download speed of 1.71 Mbps was the second fastest and only 100 Kbps lower than first place holder Morocco’s 1.81 Mbps.  Local download speeds were also significantly higher than the African average of 1.18 Mbps.

South Africa fared worse when it came to upload speeds.  With an average uplink speed of 0.4 Mbps South Africa was placed fifth in Africa behind Uganda (1.1 Mbps), Kenya (0.64 Mbps), Gambia (0.55 Mbps) and Botswana (0.41 Mbps).

Broadband speeds discussion