MCA's Corner: How Does Your Internet Connection Speed Compare to Users' Worldwide?

Very informative

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How Does Your Internet Connection Speed Compare to Users' Worldwide?

via ReadWriteWeb by Audrey Watters on 11/12/10

With the increasing amount of bandwidth we're all sucking down these days, it's no surprise that we often feel like our Internet speeds just aren't fast enough. But how fast are our connections? And how does one country stack up against another? Royal Pingdom has released some data today, based on information from the CDN provider Akamai that compares connections speeds internationally. The report looks at the "real world speeds" (not just what service providers advertise) for people in the 50 countries with the most Internet users - all told 1.8 billion Internet users.

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Of the top 10 countries, 3 are from Asia (the top 3, in fact), and 7 are from Europe. Coming in at number 11 is Canada (4.73 Mbits/s), beating the U.S. (4.60 Mbits/s) at number 12. There's quite a range between the number 1 country's speed - South Korea at just under 17 Mbit/s - and the speed of Internet in Iran, 0.41 Mbits/s.

Distribution of Speeds - Within and Across Countries

Based on all countries' speeds - not just the top 50's - the world average Internet speed clocks in at around 1.8 Mbits/s. A little over a fifth of Internet connections are 5 Mbits/s or faster, and more than half are 2 Mbits/s or faster.

The most colorful chart in the Royal Pingdom report looks not just at the average speed within a country, but how speeds are distributed. This graphic shows that while the slowest connection speeds (256 kbit/s) have almost disappeared in most countries, that they still comprise a good proportion of how much of the world connects to the Internet.