IRELAND HAS JUMPED up the rankings of countries with the fastest internet, and now stands second in the world.
The latest State of the Internet report by Akamai places the average speed for internet in Ireland at 17.4Mbps, an increase of 37% compared to the previous survey late last year.
We’re among South Korea (23.6Mbps), Hong Kong (16.7Mbps), Sweden (15.8Mbps), and the Netherlands (15.3Mbps) in the top five.
But things might feel a little different on the ground. It emerged in recent days that some rural parts of the north-west could have to wait as much as another 6 years for the roll out of broadband.
The National Broadband Plan – which looks at extending broadband into areas that currently do not have coverage – will be rolled out from 2016, with its full installation expected to be completed over a three- to five-year period – potentially going into 2021.
According to the search published today, Ireland ranks 48th out for broadband adoption in the Europe, Middle East, and Asia region.
For average peak connection speeds we fail to make the top ten.
This is classed as “highest connection speed calculated from each unique IP address determined to be in a specific country/region”.
“We note that we believe that the average peak connection speed is more representative of Internet connection capacity,” David Belson, a senior director at Akamai, said.
These speeds wouldn’t be encountered through normal usage, but could be spotted when downloading big files.
The average speed of the internet across the globe reached above 5Mbps for the first time in the first quarter of this year.
Akamai’s survey also analysed mobile data usage. Ireland has an average speed of 7.4 Mbps, placing us tenth in Europe.
Several countries had peak speeds of more than 50 Mbps, potentially due to the roll out of 4G and LTE technologies.
Usage of mobile data has skyrocketed in recent years, after starting to take off in late 2009.
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