Have you ever been on holiday, sat down on your computer and been amazed by the amazing internet speeds that other nations seem to have in comparison to what we get in Australia? Well, you are not alone, for this a common frustration that is shared amongst most of Australians who have travelled abroad and have come to realise how truly behind our internet speeds are here down under. In fact, it has recently been reported that Australia still lags behind the rest of the globe when it comes to internet speeds, placing us all the way down at 50th place behind our friends in New Zealand, Thailand, and even Kenya.

According to the State Of The Internet Report, whilst Australia has indeed made some modest improvements and has taken steps forward in the internet game, our progress is just nowhere near what is needed to catch up with our rivals in the Asia Pacific, namely Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Even with the NBN’s $46 Million dollar roll out, we are still struggling to provide the nation with internet speeds that we can be proud of.

The small light at the end of the tunnel is that the quarterly report on the world’s internet speeds this year has shown Australia move from 51st place to 50th place during the first quarter, overthrowing the United Arab Emirates from the top 50. Whilst this is merely just one notch up, any improvement is seen as a positive outcome for the nation when you are struggling at the bottom. Furthermore, the average download speeds in our country have reached 11.1 megabits per second, and have grown by 26 per cent since last year - a great improvement for the nation for just a period one year.

With that said, we cannot ignore the fact that our buddies next door in New Zealand completely put Australia to shame with average internet speeds of 14.7mbps and a speed boost of 40 per cent since the same time last year. If we were to look at it on a global scale, you will realise that South Korean internet users can access more than double the average speeds of Australian connections at 28.6mbps, as can those in Norway and Sweden. Imagine that - their internet basically runs twice as fast as ours do in Australia...something that we have all been dreaming of for a while now. This means music streams faster, movies load quicker and going about your daily routines on the internet can be done in half the time. Such speeds are something that we can right now, only aspire to achieve.

Australia is now also ranked 47th place in the world when it comes to connections that are over 15 megabits per second, with just under one in five, or 20 percent of internet users actually qualifying for this mark. If you want to put the speed in context, to stream high-definition shows from Netflix, you will need you need at least five megabits per second and 25 mbps to stream in Ultra HD quality. Taking that into consideration and realising that only 20% of us actually have connections that are over 15 megabits per second, speeds that are not enough to stream basic Ultra HD videos on Netflix, you can start to understand how far we are actually lagging behind.

Our ranking out of the whopping 241 countries ranked for broadband performance may come as a surprise to many due to the growing rollout of the National Broadband Network. I mean, you’d expect us to be climbing up the ladder with the NBN taking over, right? At this current moment, over 5 million premises, including homes and businesses have access to the $49 billion dollar National Broadband Network, and the company aims to have 8 million connected premises by 2020. One of the reasons we could be ranking so low is that the Akamai report this year covers the millions of Australians who have yet to be hooked up with a NBN connection - thus, explaining the creepingly slow internet speeds. However, with the NBN recently announcing their change in wholesale prices, it is anticipated that heaps more people will be signing up to the NBN. With more people connected to faster NBN speeds, we can hope to see Australia climb up in internet speed rankings over the next year.

But don’t worry, this report is not all about gloom and doom. Thankfully, it’s not all bad news for Australia. The Akamai report has shown that Australia does indeed lead with the average speed of its mobile internet. Have you ever had a problem with your mobile internet speeds? Chances are you haven’t, and there is a good reason behind this. Average mobile internet speeds in Australia are 15.7Mbps, a result that places our nation ahead many of the countries in the Asia Pacific, America, the Middle East, Africa and a large majority of Europe.

So, how have we gone about staying on top of the mobile internet game? Well, significant progress has been made by eliminating mobile frequencies of the past such as 2G and GSM phones, paving the way for new and emerging technologies. Many of the major mobile networks in Australia have also diligently retired older mobile networks, showing huge progress to support the building and development of better mobile connection speeds. In fact, Telstra's introduction of Gigabit LTE in Sydney is a world first, offering incredible download speeds of nearly 1Gbps. Such amazing speeds put us right up there amongst countries such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.

Whilst we do have a long way to go when it comes to upping our internet speed game, we do believe that in the coming years, once most of us are connected to the NBN, we will indeed see a major shift in our global rankings and believe that Australia will climb up the ladder only in a matter of time. For those who are already connected to the NBN and are looking to upgrade your speeds, do not hesitate to contact us today.