Broadband Speeds: SA versus the world
| Rudolph Muller | August 25, 2009 | No comments |
Rudolph Muller
Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...
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South Africa lagging behind world standards on broadband speeds
It is well known that South Africa’s high-end broadband services are significantly more expensive than similar offerings in the developed world. To ensure affordability local broadband users typically restrict their use to a few GB per month.
South Africa does not fare much better when it comes to broadband speeds. While the average downlink speed of many countries exceed 10 Mbps, local download speeds don’t come close to these standards.
The latest statistics from the popular broadband speed test website Speedtest.net (http://www.speedtest.net), sheds light on the average broadband speeds experienced by users across the globe.
“With over twenty million tests taken every month, we provide our select clients unparalleled global broadband statistics,” the Speedtest.net website states.
Download Speeds
According to the Speedtest.net results the Republic of Korea has the fastest broadband services with an average downlink speed of 20.84 Mbps. Korea is followed by Japan with 15.73 Mbps and Aland Islands with 14.64 Mbps.
The Top 10 countries according to download speed are:
1. 20.84 Mb/s Korea
2. 15.73 Mb/s Japan
3. 14.64 Mb/s Aland Islands
4. 13.05 Mb/s Lithuania
5. 12.92 Mb/s Sweden
6. 12.64 Mb/s Latvia
7. 12.38 Mb/s Romania
8. 11.65 Mb/s Bulgaria
9. 11.46 Mb/s Netherlands
10. 9.50 Mb/s Moldova
South Africa is ranked 98th worldwide with an average downlink speed of 1.68 Mbps. This speed places the country second in Africa behind Morocco which has an average speed of 1.77 Mbps.
Upload Speeds
South Africa performed even worse on uplink speeds. With an average upload speed of 0.4 Mbps the country was ranked 109 th in the world and well below other African countries like Uganda (1.07 Mbps), Kenya (0.56 Mbps), Gambia (0.55 Mbps) and Botswana (0.42 Mbps).
The following countries topped the upload Speedtest.net list for upload speeds:
1. 8.82 Mb/s Lithuania
2. 7.04 Mb/s Japan
3. 5.47 Mb/s Bulgaria
4. 5.20 Mb/s Aland Islands
5. 5.04 Mb/s Latvia
6. 4.87 Mb/s Romania
7. 4.84 Mb/s Hong Kong
8. 4.64 Mb/s Russian Federation
9. 4.53 Mb/s Sweden
10. 4.36 Mb/s Slovenia
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