Malta has been ranked sixth in the global annual study of the quality of broadband internet connections around the world, beating countries such as the United States the UK and Germany. Malta significantly improved its ranking over the last three years, from 19th to 10th and now to sixth place.
However, when going into the merits of this ranking, one finds that Malta’s placing is more the result of the excellent penetration of broadband in homes rather than the quality of the access, i-Tech can reveal. Indeed, Malta is not listed among the countries prepared for the “internet applications of tomorrow”.
The top five places went to South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Iceland and, jointly in fifth position, Switzerland, Luxemburg, and Singapore. The USA is 15th while the UK and Germany are joint 18th.
The study was conducted by a team of MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics, and sponsored by Cisco.
Using the data from 40 million real-life broadband quality tests conducted in May-June of 2010 on the internet speed testing site, speedtest.net, the researchers were able to evaluate the broadband quality of 72 countries around the globe.
The study shows global broadband quality improved by 24 per cent in one year with more countries already prepared for the applications of tomorrow than in previous years and two thirds of the countries analysed meeting or surpassing today’s needs. Overall, thanks to a range of investments in infrastructure, global broadband quality has improved by 50 per cent in just three years and penetration of broadband continues to improve, with about half of the households of the countries investigated now having access to broadband (up from 40 percent in 2008).
The average global download speed has increased 49 per cent in just three years (3,271 Kbps in 2008, 4882 Kbps in 2009 and 5,920 Kbps in 2010).
The average global upload speed has increased 69 per cent in three years (794 Kbps in 2008, 1,345 Kbps in 2009. 1,777 Kbps in 2010).
Quality was evaluated by scoring the combined download throughput, upload throughput, and latency capabilities of a connection, the key criteria for a connection’s ability to handle specific internet applications, from consumer telepresence to online video and social networking. These criteria are expressed as a single “broadband quality score” for each country.
By combining this broadband quality score with broadband penetration figures for each country, the researchers were able to map out the world’s broadband leaders – those with the best combination of broadband quality and penetration. This combination in fact propelled Malta to the sixth place in this year’s rankings.
Hong Kong, Iceland, South Korea, Luxemburg and Malta lead in broadband penetration with take-up reaching 100 per cent of households.
Sweden, Denmark, USA, and Spain are the world leaders in mobile broadband quality. Sweden and Denmark are also in the leading group in fixed-line broadband
Broadband quality in South Korea is ranked the highest and has set a new benchmark for the world.
Average download throughput is 33.5 Mbps, an increase of 55 per cent from 2009, average upload throughput is 17 Mbps, an increase of 430 per cent, and average latency is 47ms, an improvement of 35 per cent vs. 2009 figure. The country has occupied the top spot for the last three years.
48 countries, (66 per cent), are meeting the requirements to enjoy all the major services offered by the internet today (defined in the study as social networking, low-definition video streaming, basic video-conferencing, small file sharing), as well as not so demanding applications (such as instant messaging, e-mail, web browsing). This adds 10 countries since 2009, and 18 since 2008.
Fourteen countries are already prepared for the “internet applications of tomorrow”, such as high definition internet TV and high quality video communications services (consumer telepresence) which are expected to become mainstream in just a few years time. These countries are South Korea, Japan, Latvia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Finland, Romania, Lithuania, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Germany, Portugal, Denmark and Iceland. This is up from nine countries in 2009 and just one in 2008 (Japan).