New Zealand ranked 30th for Internet download speeds

New Zealand has been ranked 30^th in a global ‘league table’ of average broadband download speeds compiled by UK broadband, TV and phone comparator, Cable.co.uk.  

New Zealand rated a mean download speed of 16.6Mbps, less than one third that of global leader Singapore with 55.13Mbps, but well ahead of Australia, which was in 55^th position with an average of only 7.7Mbps.  

Cable.co.uk says that UK telecoms regulator Ofcom deems 10Mbps to be “the minimum required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business.”  

The results put New Zealand one rung above the UK where the average speed record was 16.51Mbps. Cable.co.uk observed that this put the country below 20 other European countries.  

The data on which the rankings are based was collected across the 12 months up to 10 May this year by M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University's PlanetLab, and other supporting partners.  

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) says it aims to provide an open, verifiable measurement platform for global network performance, as well as hosting the largest open internet performance dataset on the planet.  

It claims to have tested at least 100 unique IP addresses in each country and to determine the bandwidth by creating congestion between the client and server machines to stress the broadband connection.  

According to Cable.co.uk, “The download part of Measurement Lab’s NDT application measures the throughput of a single TCP connection, attempting to transfer as much data as possible for a period of at least ten seconds.”  

It says this methodology is more indicative of the user’s real world download experience than other tests, such as that written by Ookla that “work hard to drive the ‘last mile’, the link between the test initiator and their ISP.”  

The full league table of the 189 countries surveyed can be found here.