A new study by Ookla shows what many consumers in SA already suspected: that the country performs poorly when it comes to broadband connectivity speeds.

According to the newly published Net Index, which is based on millions of recent test results from website Speedtest.net, SA ranks 93rd in the world for broadband download speeds, directly behind Mexico, the Philippines and Uganda.

The index, which compares and ranks consumer download speeds around the world, says the average download speed to SA consumers is 2,2Mbit/s. That’s substantially below the world average of 7,7Mbit/s. The index does not measure broadband penetration and measures local, not international bandwidth.

The top five countries in the index are South Korea, where average download speeds were measured at 34,1Mbit/s, Latvia (24,3Mbit/s), Moldova (21,4Mbit/s), Japan (20,3Mbit/s) and Sweden (19,8Mbit/s).

Big economies like the US (10,1Mbit/s) and China (2,9Mbit/s) performed relatively poorly compared to the leading countries.

The worst places to try to download data from the Internet are Yemen (0,44Mbit/s) and Mali (0,42Mbit/s), with Sudan propping up the bottom of the list at 0,34Mbit/s.

When it comes to uploads, SA performs even worse than it does in downloads, coming 102nd out of the 152 countries listed, with an average speed of just 0,58Mbit/s. That puts SA in the same company as Montenegro, Syria and Lybia.

The best countries in which to upload data to the Internet are South Korea (18Mbit/s), Latvia (12,6Mbit/s) and Japan (11,1Mbit/s). The worst-off are Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon.

The index also measures the quality of each country’s broadband connections, and here SA fares much better, coming in 28th overall and falling well within what is defined as a “desirable” connection quality.

Lithuania, Moldova and Tunisia come out tops in the household quality index, with Egypt, Bahrain and Lebanon faring worst. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral