Study: Strong growth lifts Australia's broadband speeds

Off a very low base.

Internet speeds in Australia may be far slower than other developed nations, but things are improving rapidly, according to a recent Akamai report on the ‘State of the Internet’.

Akamai’s 2010 Q4 report showed that the average connection speed in Australia was 3 Mbps, a 35 percent increase on the same period last year.

Over half of Australian households connected to the internet do so on speeds above 2 Mbps – meeting Akamai’s definition of broadband.

This represented 41 percent growth on the same quarter in 2009 - the fastest growth rate in the Asia Pacific region - but still leagues behind Hong Kong (93 percent over 2 Mbps), South Korea (87 percent), Japan (80 percent) and Taiwan (79 percent).

Only 12 percent of Australians enjoyed speeds above 5 Mbps, versus over 50 percent in Japan and South Korea.

The average peak broadband connection speeds in Australia for the quarter was 12.6 Mbps – up 53 percent on the same quarter in 2009, again under half the speed of Japan and Korea.

Pick the network

The report also showed a marked disparity between data downloads recorded on two Australian mobile networks – which unfortunately were not named.

On one network – named AU-3 - average mobile connection speeds during the quarter came in at 1.5 Mbps, a second (AU-1), came in just over 1 Mbps.

But the latter network (AU-1) offered higher average peak speeds – capable of hitting around 9.5 Mbps compared to 7.3 Mbps at AU-3.

Users also sucked a lot more data on this (AU-1) network – some 1.6 GB per month versus only 231 MB on AU-3.

Which network would you expect to be AU-3 and which AU-1?