Australian Internet Develops Slower than Before

It turned out that in terms of Internet speed, Australia is developing slower than its neighbors – Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Although the country’s Internet does speed up, it does so not as fast as elsewhere. According to the recent research, average connection speeds in the country increased by 27% last year to reach 5.8 Mbps. However, Australia dropped 3 places in global speed rankings and came 44th, outrun by its neighbors Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.

Australia is followed by New Zealand with its average speeds of 5.3 Mbps, but South Korea is ahead of everyone with average speeds of 21.9 Mbps. 2013 was the first time when the top 10 ranked states had average connection speeds over the “high broadband” threshold of 10 Mbps. Within the top 10, Ireland saw an 8.4% increase to 10.4 Mbps, and the US – a 2% increase to 10 Mbps. The leaders also include Japan, Hong Kong, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, and Latvia.

Australia took the 32nd place in average peak connection speeds at 35.2 Mbps, which is an increase of 26% from the previous year. Hong Kong was first with its 68 Mbps. The metric was determined by taking the average of the highest connection speed for each unique IP address. As for the proportion of the local users with “high broadband” connectivity, it doubled last year and reached 9.7%.

More and more people have been recently seen opting for plans promising maximum speeds of more than 24 Mbps. The number of citizens signing on to such plans increased 27% last year to pass 2,000,000. Nevertheless, real speeds were in most cases far slower due to various factors like modem quality and the distance between a user and the nearest Internet exchange.

The report revealed that broadband sped up impressively across the board in the Asia Pacific region. In the meantime, the global average connection speed increased 5.5% and reached 3.8 Mbps. 24 Mbps connection allows to download around 180 megabytes of data per minute.

By the way, the same report showed that China remained the biggest source of computer attacks, as the country generated 43% of all attack traffic. The report was based on data collected by Akamai’s “Intelligent Platform”, which handles up to 1/3 of the world’s Internet traffic through over 100,000 servers.