The BBC recently did some research into the “advertised” speeds of Broad Band around the world. This is interesting because we often hear and read reports in our media that Australia is a “third world” contry with respect to our broadband speeds.
There is a nice little site called Speedtest.net that fives a real world assessment of your actua broadband speeds. How this works is that people from around the world use the site to perform a number of operations which result in a record of the real world connection speed of your connection. The site then collates all of these results and gives each country/continent a figure for average speeds.
Now here is the interesting part. The BBC survey only covered OECD countries and Australia was seventh. Once you remove Japan, Korea and France which have extremely high rates due tio huge government sponsored programs we sit around average ADSL 2+ speeds, which is what one would expect.
On the other hand using the Speedtest.net result, we are the third highest continent, sitting behind Europe and North America we are the 38th country. This has to be a far more accurate list since it uses real users doing real tests. Our average speed on Speedtest.net is 4.43 Mb which is way below the top six countries and way below average advertised rates. To be fair the BBC method of using advertised rates is looking pretty sick when you look at Speedtest.net’s results. The problem here is – as will all measurements of this type – interpreting the results so that we can understand what this means.
Looking at the continent rates we are really not much below Europe and North America, being 5.6 Mb and 5.54 Mb respectively. I would suggest that this is a more realistic figure than the country rates since Australia more resembles a continent than a country in demography and topography. With the vast sparsely inhabited regions and the divers and scattered population we have a number of significant issues in covering the population with high speed broadband. When you look at countries such as Japan Korea and France and look at how their government subsidised programs and high population densities skew the figures then Australia is really not that far behind.
What about the government’s plan to subsidise a new broadband roll-out? The problem here is that we do not have the high population densities that make it cost effective so it will always be problematic and never measure up to Korea. However the benefit will not be in the direct return on investment but will be in the overall technological advances over all technologies. This is impossible to quantify and will be a long term gain.
In terms of overall standing I don’t think that we are that far behind and considering our problems in maintaining a broadband network we are doing quite well. In my opinion we do not “need” a government sponsored plan to enhance our network but the investment now will have major long term benefits and we should not be so short sighted as to measure its viability in terms of immediate return on investment.