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It is often quicker to get information on your mobile than from your PC. Picture: Laurent Delhourme
THE nation is so behind the eight ball with internet speed that we now lag behind Kenya, Latvia, Romania and Estonia — and New Zealand.
Despite the NBN broadband rollout, Australia has slipped another place in the global rankings of Interent connectivity and is now 51 on list as revealed in the Akamai State of the Interent Report released today, down from a ranking of 48 at the end of 2015.
While the Top 10 is dominated by countries in Asia and Scandinavian, it is the other countries not known as hi-tech centres in the top 50, that sit above Australia, that cause a double take.
Kenya, Lithuania and Bulgaria have average connection speeds about 50 per cent faster than we have in Australia and Latvia is more than 70 per cent faster.
Closer to home, New Zealand has a speed advantage 30 per cent faster.
The internet speed in Australia, compared to other countries, is getting worse the Akamai State of the Interent Report claims. Picture: Ingram PublishingSource:Supplied
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There is some good news for Australia.
Our average internet connection speed in the past quarter has climbed from 9.6Mbps to 10.1Mbps, and Australia sits much higher on the global rankings in terms of mobile connectivity, having faster mobile network internet than Japan, South Korea, the United States and Singapore.
The jump in average internet speed in Australia is due to the rollout of the NBN, with about one in every six Australians now connected to the national broadband network.
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An NBN spokesman said since the start of 2013, the average speed of internet connectivity in Australia has more than doubled from 4.7Mbps to the current figure.
While the Akamai rankings are widely considered the industry-accepted standard for comparing internet connectivity across the world, an NBN spokesman said one of the limitations of the Akamai report was that of the 10 million Australian internet lines it tested mostly were still on an ADSL connection.
The NBN also has a longstanding issue with the Akamai rankings in that the comparative speed test looks at the speed the customer is using rather than the potential speed the customer could use.
Eighty per cent of Australians who have signed up to the NBN have opted for a maximum speed of up to 25Mbps, and only 13 per cent have signed up for the much faster and more expensive high-end 100Mbps.