Australia tops APAC in mobile speeds

Australia is leading Asia–Pacific in terms of mobile broadband connection speeds, but is falling further behind in the global rankings for fixed line speeds, Akamai's latest quarterly State of the Internet Report shows.

Australia recorded an average mobile connection speed of 13.8 Mbps during the fourth quarter, the highest in Asia–Pacific but substantially behind global leader the UK's 26.8 Mbps.

But the nation's position on the global fixed line leaderboard slipped to 51st, down from 50th in the previous quarter and 48th at the end of 2015 — even though the average speed improved to 10.1 Mbps from 9.6 Mbps in the third quarter. The global average connection speed for the quarter was 7 Mbps.

Among Asia–Pacific countries, Australia ranked eighth, behind South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and New Zealand.

The report also shows that Australia scored a distant 67th place globally for 4 Mbps or higher broadband adoption, at just 76%. This represented a 1.9% decline from the previous quarter.

The nation fared little better in terms of 10 Mbps or higher adoption (50th globally with 30% adoption) and 15 Mbps or higher adoption (49th globally at 16%).

The report notes that in October, nbn achieved peak speeds of 8 Gpbs over 30 metres of copper cables in conjunction with Nokia's Bell Labs using the XG-Fast last-mile connection technology being considered for inclusion into the NBN.

During the quarter, Australia also saw its first public demonstration of 5G mobile technology, with Vodafone and Nokia together achieving speeds of close to 6 Gbps with 2.8 ms latencies.

Image courtesy of Michael Coghlan under CC