Zim drops places in broadband speed

13 Jul, 2018 - 00:07 0 Views

eBusiness Weekly

Kudzanai Sharara
Zimbabwe came 16 places lower at 121 out of 200 countries in the worldwide broadband speed league 2018, new data from M-Lab, a research partnership between Google, Princeton, and groups like the Open Technology Institute has shown.

The country had an average speed of 2.86 mbps according to the research compiled by Cable between June 2017 and May 2018. Though the ranking is lower than last year, the speed has actually improved from 2.49 mbps for the comparative prior year.

There were only 2 455 (1 700 in 2017) tests in Zimbabwe and there were only 715 distinct Ips (697 in 2017).

The average time it takes to download a typical HD movie 5GB in the country is 3 hours,58 minutes and 44 seconds.

This is an improvement from the 6 hours and 50 minutes it took to download the movie in the previous findings.

This comes as the internet penetration rate in the country has surpassed the 50 percent mark and is expected to continue growing on the back of 3G and 4G as well as fixed internet technologies such as Fibre and ADSL.

According to regulator, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), 3G/HSDPA/LTE constitute the largest portion of active internet subscriptions with a share of 98 percent of the total internet subscriptions. Zimbabwe has active internet subscriptions as at March 31, 2018 was 7 221 640.

The latest ranking is 16 places lower than where the country was in 2017 ranking, which was 105th out of 186 countries.

Based on over 163 million speed tests, carried out over 12 months, the speed league ranks countries across the world for their broadband speed.

Among African countries, Zimbabwe lags behind countries like Ghana ranked 120, Tunisia 112, Morocco 105.

The top ranked African countries are, however ,Madagascar, which jumped a whopping 67 places in the past year to reach 22nd place overall and Kenya ranked 64 as well as South Africa ranked 76th.

Meanwhile, the global average internet speed as measured by 163 million individual speed tests rose by 23 percent. The average broadband connection now clocks in at 9.1Mbps, up from 7.4Mbps in the year before.

Countries with fastest broadband speed are Singapore at number 1 with a speed of 60.39mbps and Sweden second with a speed of 46 mbps.

However, the United States was the biggest mover, after moving up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018.

This was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20Mbps to nearly 26Mbps, a bigger increase than the average.

Surprisingly, China is lower than most countries coming out at 141st place (from 134), with a download speed of just 2.4Mbps.

This was the second year of data collection, carried out by M-Lab, a collaboration between New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab and other supporting partners.

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