Taiwan, Singapore and Jersey top the list of the places with the fastest internet speeds in the world – the Nigeria is at 176th place while the UK and US are 34th and 15th in the ‘Global League‘ rankings.
The average download speed in top spot Taiwan is 85 megabits per second and that speed it would take someone just eight seconds to download a high definition movie.
Researchers from WebsiteToolTester studied data submitted by internet users through online speed tests, excluded any with an obvious fault on the line and collated them to create the global ranking.
The average speed for the Earth has gone from about 9Mbps in 2017 to just over 11Mbps in 2019 – which researchers put down to infrastructure improvements.
They also found that 18 of the top 25 countries with the fastest internet speeds were in Europe – with the fastest coming from the tiny island of Jersey – with speeds of 67Mbps – 100 per cent higher than the UK.
To gather the data they took speed tests completed by people online across the world – with billions of different tests analysed to curate the ‘global league’ of results.
There are risks with this approach – people are more likely to do a speed test when there is a problem and the average speed reported is slower than the speed available due to slower WiFi or connections in the house.
“This is why the country averages will appear lower than you might expect when compared to first-hand experience,” the authors of the report said.
“However, since every country’s average will suffer this flaw – innate to speed tests – the comparative placement in the global league is relatively sound.”
They said the aim of the study was to provide a league of ‘relative broadband speeds’ not absolute measures of bandwidth – so the flaws actually create a more realistic picture.
The highest placed European country in the league was the tiny island of Jersey – the average download speed was reported as 67.4Mbps and it would take just 10 seconds to download a movie.
This isn’t really a surprise, according to Andrew Ferguson from ThinkBroadband, and independent internet speed comparison service that studies UK networks.
“The improved nature of Jersey is very much to be expected as the island has seen a roll-out of full fibre replacing the old ADSL2+ network,” he said.
“Though there is a caveat around the data sample size for Jersey with 551 distinct IP addresses from some 40,000 premises, i.e. it is a small sample and this may mean the confidence levels are much lower.”
The slowest country in the world for broadband speeds is the Yemen where it would take more than 30 minutes to download a movie from a 300 Kbps internet connection – that is just a third of a megabit and slower than even 3G mobile internet.
In the case of Nigeria, the broadband speeds is put at 1.56Mbps despite its 200 million population and an active young generation of internet users.
Madagascar leads the way in Africa with 22.57Mbps and is placed 33rd one place above the UK. The Island in the Indian Ocean is followed by South Africa which is placed at 75 with 8.4Mbps.
Kenya is at 84th with 7.62Mbps and Morocco is placed 100th with 5.48Mbps.
