Those hanging out for the NBN might find the latest results of a global study of broadband speeds sobering reading. Australia doesn’t rank in the top five, but even high-speed countries like South Korea aren’t that blazingly fast either.
The low Australian average got to be down to the nature of averages — any low figures will tilt the figures downwards, after all. There’s still folks out there on low-speed 256kbps broadband, and that’ll spin the figures lower for everybody. Although for the competitive types; New Zealand has faster average broadband than we do.
Still, the map of Pando Network’s findings is fascinating anyway; for as much as South Korea might top the world, it does so only at an average connection speed of 2,202KBps. What’s more interesting is how fast Eastern Europe is catching up; the rest of the top five are all Eastern European nations, with Romania at #2 (1,909KBps) Bulgaria #3 (1,611KBps), Lithuania #4 (1,462KBps) and Latvia at #5 (1,377KBps).
I suddenly feel a lot better about my lousy home ADSL2+ service (although most of that is apparently my fault for living so far from the exchange.) [Pando Networks via Huffington Post | Image: Shutterstock/marema]
Stuart
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:17 PMAnd no one can blame that we’re too big of a country to provide fast internet everywhere. Russia is over double our average! I can’t wait for the NBN (although living in SA means we’ll be dead last to get it)
Rooboy
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:54 PMStuart the biggest problem with the NBN in Australia is the vast distances between major centres. This is something that will always be a challenge for Aussie companies to deal with, while Russia may be a larger country, they have three things in their favour:
1.) Russia population is ‘slightly’ larger than Australia (139 Million vs 21 Million)
2.) Russia while vast doesn’t have the hundreds to thousands of kilometeres between major cities like in Aus
3.) the GDP for Russia can afford to piss away billions on an NBN unlike Australia.
james mac
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 2:01 PMI’d call the distance between St Petersburg and Vladivostok pretty damn vast.
Chas
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 7:04 PMObviously Rooboy has never looked at a map…
Russia has 7 time zones.
Nor has he bothered to look at the real numbers…
Russia has a GDP of $1.46 Trillion, and Australia has a GDP of $1.23 Trillion.
Australia has a LOT more money per capita than Russia…like 5-6 times more!
Must work for Abbott…:)
Cheshire Cat
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:57 PM+1 chas. I’ve seen rooboy posting some pretty biased unfounded twat on smh forums too.
Isn’t Australia one of the most centralized countries in the world (baring the city ones like Singapore)?
Richard
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:58 AMRooboy is partly right but for the wrong reason. It’s not the distance between exchanges which is the problem, but the distance from exchanges to the homes because we like to live in single dwellings on larger than average (by world standards) blocks of land.
dennis
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 10:54 AMSadly he is correct, Yes Russia is bigger but they have 40 million Internet users. That is compared to the 15.8 in australia.
Then you need to look at content.
Korea, China, Russia would all be viewing local content for the most part. This is due to language more than anything. Sure they have external content but the bulk would be in their own language.
Australia’s content needs to be pulled from the states mostly. There is 19 cables running from Aust just for this!
Chas
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 1:13 PMI think you are forgetting that they have LESS than 20% of our per capita GDP.
Our country is one of the (if not THE) wealthiest per capita countries in the world.
Our minimum wage on an equalized basis is higher than anybody but Denmark, and for the vast majority, by more than 1000%!
It is sad that there are actually some people out there who still believe that we poor Aussies can’t afford to compete with the other countries…
Arafurian
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 3:50 PMThe problem with statistics is that they were invented by the accountant with his head in an oven, and his feet in the freezer, who accordingly found himself most comfortable on average. Yes, Australia is rich, but many Australians are not. The cost of living here is high, so that some Australians can find themselves with an income that would be a fortune in another country, yet unable to buy enough food to survive on. Internet speeds are another source of statistical wonder. I live in the Northern Territory, the land that Telstra forgot, where Telstra’s 5Mb speed translates into dialup in the home. Ah, the wonders of statistics!
Evo
Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 12:33 AM+1 Arafurian
Russia’s population density is 2.2-2.8 times greater than Australia’s, which virtually directly translates to a difference in cost of internet networks for fixed line services. If Australia was buying all of our infrastructure from overseas (USA) we would be doing a lot better, unfortunately ( fortunately depending on your point of view) we are buying the majority in Australia. Using PPP, our per capital income is 2-2.4x greater than Russia. Throw internet usage and percentage of urbanised population in to the mix and and it starts getting more complicated. Our advantage in PPP per capita income does not necessary make up for the difference in population density.
me
Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 4:34 PMit does? i thought SA was the first to get it
Cam
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:24 PMWhy must Pando report speeds in KB (kilobytes)/s rather than kb (kilobits)/s which is how network speed is normally measured?
Luke
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:30 PMMore relate-able for the average end user perhaps? it is after all what we see in our download managers and windows in our browswers/ftp clients.
Chas
Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 2:48 PM“The cost of living here is high, so that some Australians can find themselves with an income that would be a fortune in another country”
Actually, those numbers I quoted were normalized for cost of living and currency. We really are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Just go by Santa Monica California and look at all the 10s of thousands of homeless to see what I mean. We have a few homeless in this country, but nothing by comparison to the US (and that’s on a percentage basis as well).
Evo
Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 12:46 AMOur currency is currently very high against the US, nominal (normalized?) is by exchange rate (we are around 4th), PPP is adjusted by assumptions about costs of living (we are around 14th). Costs of living in major cities, especially housing, are growing at among the fastest rates in the world. Sydney beat London last year for cost of living, wtf.
Using official statistics America has approximately 7 times the number of homeless but 10 times the population as Australia (official statistics are generally considered inaccurate for homeless), using estimates its there are 10-12 times more. Its still fairly relative.
light487
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:53 PMNational averages aren’t too great though.. would like to see a more granular look, maybe by state, of Australia’s average speeds.. but even that wouldn’t be very good.. you’d need to go even further down into regions..
Ryan
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:11 PMI was thinking the exact same thing. In addition to having a more granular view of internet speeds, medians should (always) be used instead. Averages can be so misleading. eg. While the USA may look like they have fairly good speeds on the whole, breaking it down state by state, things start to look a lot different. Speeds in Delaware are wildly different from those in Arkansas for example.
I also wouldn’t mind seeing a graph or similar that shows median internet speeds that are delivered to x% of people. For example, 80% of people who live in metro Melbourne achieve a median internet speed of 8Mbps.
Ozoneocean
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 2:00 PMHow would “dial-up” affect the average if this is only measuring “broadband”? I sort of thought that the whole “broadband” term was thought up as a way of distinguishing it FROM dial-up?
These figures are far too general to be helpful. I’d much rather see what the averages for their top speeds are and what percentage of their population HAS those speeds.
For example, Russia and Romania might have superspeed internet, but maybe only 20% of the entire population are even ON it. Without knowing stuff like that this map is just wallpaper.
Alex Kidman
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 2:17 PMExcellent point — a brain flub from when I was writing it up; original intent was to point out all the folks on dud sub-broadband 256kbps connections. Which I’ve now altered it to.
More data is always more useful, but we work with what we can get :)
ozoneocean
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 2:50 AMTrue, the data you get is the date you get :)
Launch
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 2:31 PMI’d love to have 348KBps. That’s almost double what I get currently. :P
Jamie
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 2:47 PMAt least you can actually get ADSL2+, Alex. I’m still stuck with ADSL1. Lucky it syncs at 7mbits though so it’s not tooooo painful.
typedmillepede
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 3:46 PMadsl2+ at my home. lucky to get 2 mb/s. you don’t know pain.
Alex
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 3:12 PMMy adsl2 is just under 5mb/s, i would be more than happy with adsl1 at 7mb/s.
Leo
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 3:28 PMMark twain used to say- there are lies, brutal lies and … statistics.
DrApple
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 4:07 PMAustralia’s current lines are a mess, even if you are close to the exchange it doesn’t mean you will be able to get ADSL 2+. My last two houses were near exchanges but neither could reliably get ADSL2+ despite it being advertised as available.
Dmoli
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 4:49 PMI recently moved 100m down the road from one unit to another, that move took me from ADSL2+ back to ADSL1. I wasn’t pleased to stay the least. So yeah, even moving within the same building doesn’t guarantee ADSL2. Stupid RIM boxes.
Blake
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 4:24 PMI have ADSL2+ and I sync at 4Mbps. Gimme an upgrade damn you.
Asmo
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 4:29 PMAnd conversely, my ADSL1+ (8 Mbit max) on a RIM ~4km’s from the exchange runs at 8 Mbit (827 KB/sec is the fastest speed I’ve seen it run at, and that is during peak times).
I live 20 Km’s out of a major regional centre.
I know there are people out there stuck with crappy connections, PGS or congested RIM’s, in black spots etc, but on the whole, Australian internet isn’t anywhere near as bad as the hyperbole makes it out. We certainly aren’t “third world” as some would claim.
Blake
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 11:55 AMYou just beat physics, congrats!
Harley
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 6:24 PMHow did he beat physics?
The RIM is 4km from the exchange. RIMs are usually connected by optic fibre.
He doesn’t say how far he is from the RIM but if he is getting 827KB/s and says it’s syncing at 8MBit then that fits for a distance of about 3km (reasonable for a RIM).
Pierre
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 4:36 PMNBN?? Yea, right. If you’re living in regional AU, the next pink thing you see in the sky is a pig flying.
On the bright side, I’m averaging about 732kbps, so I’ll count my blessings.
Eric
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 5:38 PMI find this funny
“but even high-speed countries like South Korea aren’t that blazingly fast either.(2,202KBps)”
Statistic or not, the report finding still said Korea is 6 time over the Australian average.
I can imagine executives crying poor “I don’t earn that much, just 6 times more then any average Australian”
Bern
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 2:58 PMEric, an executive *would* cry poor if they were only earning 6 times average income… if you accept the ~$50k figure for average income, then $300k is a pretty low figure for a senior exec, particularly a CEO.
Of course, that speaks volumes about the appropriateness of CEO incomes…
aaron
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 6:01 PMgive me the NBN 24334kbps sync just isnt enough
Nathan
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 6:14 PMPerhaps the NBN really will transform our economy as the Governments says. Look at Eastern Europe. Future demand for data will be driven by an economy based on spam, scams and hacking for organised crime. When we’ve got the NBN we can take on the world leaders in these industry’s.
Antonia
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 8:24 PMWhen the mobile phone came to Australia were you able to predict that over 4 trillion SMS messages would be sent annually by 2008? No, then why are you so sure that only crime will benefit from the NBN?
Harley
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 6:26 PMYes, and so were the phone companies. It’s a no brainer. That’s why they’ve charged people through the nose from the beginning for it – it’s a cash cow.
howlong
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 10:43 AMNathan, I’m going to open an illegal apostrophe factory
Erictoo
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 6:40 PMIt’s interesting that the two lowest speeds are in the areas we get all the rare metals to build all our technology. They’re too busy killing each other (over resources to sell to us) to care about KBps.
Stephen
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 7:42 PMRussia’s faster? That is surprising.
Otacon
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 9:17 PMMy friend’s flat block in a small town in Poland has fibre internet. Too bad her family can’t afford it but the option is there.
Poland also has LTE services which can provide download speeds of 100MB/s, so you could download a 1gb file in ten seconds in optimal conditions.
Russell
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 12:42 AMI’m happy my internet speeds are MARGINALLY better than average in this country.
But that doesn’t say much, now does it?
Patrick
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 7:25 AMI agree with Otacon.
I moved from Aus to Poland two months ago.
I had ADSL2+ with internode in the heart of Canberra and could only get 3.2Mbit/s Max. Now I’m in an apartment block in Warsaw, Poland and getting 100Mbit/s internet. Equivalent to NBN.
Harley
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 6:33 PMLand area Poland = 312685
Land area Australia = 7692024
Poland as a percentage of Australia’s land area = 4%
I’ll roll Poland out with optic fibre and flux capacitors at that size…
Jason
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:32 AMI am 4km from the exchange on ADSL.
348KBps would be better than the 250KBps I get currently……
But since I am getting better than 150KBps, Telstra wash there hands of it.
Just wrong!
Cant wait for NBN Fibre.
Ethan
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:23 AMI don’t think there will be much fibre in the NBN.
Dave
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:57 AMYou’ll find that most ADSL1 has been phased out in Australia.
1500Kbps should be the lowest rate offered, bu people may not even get that fast, and of course plenty of people still on grandfathered plans.
Simon Shaw
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 11:01 AM5km from exchange in suburban Perth. 2-3mbit on ADSL 2+ :(
Mitch
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 1:17 PMMate, im in Perth, less than a Km from the exchange and i cant even get adls2 i have to use adsl 1 and still pay $70+ for it.
Lucky i still get around 6Mbit though.
Now im happy with the speed, i can still game no problems but it does drop alot, Further more someone living so close shouldnt have to get old fashioned technology and pay and arm and a leg for it.
Kev
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 12:51 PMI think a lot of the things skewing it is our accessibility to the internet. In many of the eastern european countries I can assume that anyone further than 20km from a city centre wouldnt even bother with the net. As such you dont get any distortion by slower than average regional centres. Whereas here, we have a very high take up. Population density in European cities is high and this helps push up their average speeds.
Jobe
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 1:24 PMWhy talk about speed of a connection in KB (Kilobytes) instead of Kb (Kilobites)?
Internet connection speed is generally stated in kilobites whereas download speed is in kilobytes.
Bring on the NBN, 100mbps connection (12.5MB/s).
Dan
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 5:07 PMADSL 2+ dosent mean 20megabits a sec, I only get 5.5mbps (702KBps)