Q2 2015 UK Average Broadband Speeds Top 11.8Mbps vs 5.1Mbps Globally

Akamai has today published their latest Q2 2015 State of the Internet (SotI) report to reveal that the world’s average fixed line broadband download speed is now 5.1Mbps (up from 5Mbps in Q1), which compares with 11.8Mbps in the United Kingdom (up from 11.6Mbps). The UK’s overall country ranking has also improved from 21nd to 19th.

The new data is based upon the performance of Akamai’s global Content Delivery Network, which accounts for around 15-30% of all web traffic, although this does not strictly reflect actual end-user connection speeds (i.e. it’s more a reflection of the CDN performance and its related connections to ISPs and consumers around the world).

However, starting with this quarter’s report, they’ve begun to filter out connections from IP address blocks associated with leading cloud service providers. Related data centres generally have extremely high-speed Internet connections that are not necessarily representative of end user performance. As such this has had an impact on today’s results and past data, so don’t be surprised if there are a few small discrepancies.

Elsewhere it’s worth noting that even some of the fastest countries with national fibre optic infrastructure (FTTH/P), such as South Korea (average of 23.1Mbps), still appear to deliver fairly pedestrian performance. This is because consumers often pick slower speed packages to save money, while network congestion or traffic management may also play a part.

As for peak speeds, this makes the top 10 look a bit different..

As usual the United Kingdom doesn’t show up in the top 10 table, largely because other countries appear to be improving their connection performance at a faster rate than we are, although we do show up in the wider results and here’s a quick summary of how things have changed since last year.

At this point we’ll contrast the UK results with those for the wider Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, which shows that we’re ahead of the other major EU states (e.g. Germany, France, Spain and Italy), yet trailing many of the smaller countries.

In addition, the UK will need to watch out for Germany as they’re closing fast. At the end of last year Germany held a country ranking of 29th, but they’ve since risen to 26th in Q1 2015 and have now jumped again to 24th. It’s easy to predict, given the UK’s low quarterly change, that Germany could jump ahead and possibly as soon as the next Q3 report.

At this point in the report we’d normally move on to summarise mobile data (Mobile Broadband) performance, which has historically proven to deliver some quite wild results (it’s a difficult thing to judge even at the best of times).

But this time around Akamai has perhaps wisely decided to remove mobile connectivity from their report. The Internet giant admits that its ability to accurately identify mobile users “may be imperfect” and that judging their performance was often a “mix of art and science.”

The good news is that Akamai are implementing a number of refinements to improve the accuracy of mobile network identification and performance reporting, which will be introduced over the next few months. In other words, we won’t see mobile connectivity being re-added for a little while.

Akamai’s State of the Internet Q2 2015 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/