Source: The Economist
MANY technologically savvy nations lag pitifully when it comes to broadband speeds available to their citizens. The OECD, a club of rich countries, puts the United States and Britain below more recent digital revolutionaries, like Slovenia. But the OECD figures are based on advertised speeds, not measured ones. Pando Networks has, however, been looking into the internet's actual zippiness. Its findings support the OECD's conclusions.
Pando works with content providers around the world to speed up the transfer of large video files for streaming, as well as of the oodles of data associated with modern online (and offline) immersive games. It measures the speed of each byte transferred, and recently produced a report analysing the 35 petabytes (35m gigabytes) of data it shifted for consumers in the first half of 2011.
These data, shipped across 18,000 internet service providers to 20m unique computers, produced some unsurprising results. South Korea's average download rate is nearly 18 megabits per second (Mbps)—or just over 2 megabytes per second (MB/s). South Korea has invested substantially in its national infrastructure, which service providers have duly tapped. Ten Korean cities rank in the top 12 in the world for download speed, with Seocho averaging a whopping 33.5Mbps (4MB/s). Japan (with an average of 11Mbps), Hong King (8Mbps), and Taiwan (7Mbps) have made similar commitments and are near the top of the table.
The surprises come when one examines the rest of Pando's top 15 list. Romania is in second place, with 15 Mbps, followed by Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia (13Mbps, 11.5Mbps and 11Mbps). Ukraine and Moldova even score spots on the chart with 9.5Mbps and 7.5Mbps. Scandinavia takes nearly all the other slots (from 10Mbps for Sweden down to 6.5Mbps for Norway). Americans, off that list, trudge along at 5Mbps, on average. And Britain crawls at a fraction below that, with rates as low as 1Mbps in Swithland and Loddington up to a high of 10Mbps in Brighton.
Pando's boss, Robert Levitan, explains that the reasons may be historical. Many ex-communist countries have been wired for broadband more recently, with newer, faster connections than their richer European peers which began their love affair with the web earlier. Moreover, computer ownership rates are typically below the EU average, so those that do own one can afford a snappier connection.
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