According to Akamai Technologies latest international report of the state of the internet, Australia’s ranks 50th in the world. This is based on average internet connection speeds for the first quarter of 2010. If your not familiar with Akamai, they are one of the largest CDNs in the world. Distributing massive amounts of data around the world for some o the biggest companies in the world – Amazon, Microsoft, BBC and Hulu to name a few.
Quite frankly 50th place is abysmal for a developed country, fortunately we at least have a strategy for the future to improve our standing dramatically – the NBN. Our Average connection speed of 2.6Mbps which is actually a decent speed, 3 years ago. Australian consumers are quickly adopting ADSL2 as plan costs decline and data caps slowly increase. On the other end of the scale remote areas are still stuck with 256kbps or worse.. dial-up.
So how much will the NBN’s now 93% coverage of 12Mbps minimum increase our standing in the internets world ? Don’t forget other countries aren’t standing still either with at least the US (16th) and the UK working on NBN’s of their own. Add to that Australia’s new fibre network won’t be complete till around 2018, expect Aussies to trail the world for a while yet.
The first place position in the report goes to South Korea clocking in with a decent 12Mbps average. They certainly wouldn’t have been my first guess, that would have gone to Sweden or Japan with their impressive top-end speeds of 100Mbps+. Obviously there’s still some customers stuck in the past holding their average back.
Image credit: PC World
