News: 1599120429

Have I heard that before, anywhere? What were they smoking when making that comment?

I have come across the word laggard many times though. SOunds like number 47 !

With no link to the report so I can read its methodology, I'm going to say that I bet it's a pile of garbage. Then I went and looked for the methodology, which is [1]here .

Unless they chose a random sample of 1000-10000 people from each country and asked them what their broadband speed is, the answer will be wrong. First, it's very unlikely that they did this, so they will likely only be measuring people who actually have Internet in the first place. So all the people whose speed is 0 Mbps (which is important in a lot of poorer countries) aren't counted. Second, I bet it was what people from country X tested on some random speed test website, which gives you nothing, as that is only done by a very specific subset of people. So then I looked at the methodology page:

"Analysts at Cable.co.uk have analysed speed test data in 221 countries and territories to create a global league from fastest to slowest."

OK, so moving on.

Edit: No, I'm not going to move on just yet. Because this is mean Internet speeds, not median . Who are these analysts?

Edit 2: I'm still annoyed at this. It also only measures achieved speeds. I can upgrade to 500Mbps if I give my ISP more money. But I don't need that, so I don't. So am I 100Mbps, or 500Mbps?

[1] https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.cable.co.uk/broadband-speedtest/worldwide-broadband-speed-league-2020-methodology.pdf

I guess the point of measuring speeds that people actually have is that it includes some nod to economic factors with regards to connections. Everyone with a fibre connection could get a 1Gb+ contract, but if the costs involved are prohibitively high, not many people will actually do it.

"I guess the point of measuring speeds that people actually have is that it includes some nod to economic factors with regards to connections"

I agree, but then it gives you less information about broadband infrastructure, and more about what people are motivated to purchase.

Agreed. But even with the methodology you suggest, it is probably still misleading.

People don’t know their own broadband speed and believe what they are told. “Broadband Speed” is a term that has a very wide range of interpretation. I am absolutely clear that my broadband from Zen is better than my neighbours and friends broadband from providers advertising a higher headline rate. In fact the headline advertised speed is in so many ways one of the figures of lesser importance.

Additionally, average speed does not necessarily reflect opportunity and choice. If broadband is slow in the UK because there are providers like Talk-Talk providing service to people like my dear Mum was, when she was alive, who was perfectly happy if she could make the odd FaceTime call, then that actually is sufficient. Talk-Talk would annoy me beyond belief but she could have gone to Zen if she wanted to. She didn’t.

I’m not saying the choice is as good as it should be for all of the UK, but it is another factor to be considered. I don’t know if or how the survey accounted for this, because as you say, the methodology isn’t clear on the basis of this article.

"But even with the methodology you suggest, it is probably still misleading."

I agree. You cannot capture something like this with a single number. One option would be to ask a random sample to run a speed test on a variety of sites, with a purpose-built device plugged directly into the router, and report the results. That would be better, but still not good enough.

I guess it depends on what you want the number for. In this case, they want the numbers to make a story.

> they will likely only be measuring people who actually have Internet

Well, when the question is "What is your internet speed ", then obviously there is no point in asking those who don't have any internet access. Much like "What's your children's age" doesn't really concern those without any children. Average children age won't get younger because many people don't have any...

"Well, when the question is "What is your internet speed", then obviously there is no point in asking those who don't have any internet access."

Sure, except Internet is a utility. When asking 'what is the water pressure in your area?', you are perfectly entitlted to answer '0' if they haven't bothered to connect you up.

There are very few people in the world now who don't have internet connection. It may be 2G on a very cheap Android, but it is an internet connection.

Smal country = easy to wire up.

And not much contention.

The UK is starting to regain its network leadership with 5G

And therefore COVID-19 too?

Where's the link?

[1]Here . I wouldn't bother. The latest Lee Child novel is more entertaining and about as realistic.

[1] https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/

Apols, I seem to remember adding it but apparently I did not. In now.

It started with forex, then general stocks, commodities, now it is crypto tokens. Speed of trade is a factor in margin. I have seen trillions in trade$ move from continent to continent every day. Locate your offshore tax-limited trading in a small country and ensure (bribe) the leaders pay for high speed connections. I am sure someone will be trying to split photons to see if they can beat physics next.

The small wealthy population gets a bonus.

Isn't it latency at least as much as bit-rate that matters in high speed trading?

What surprises me is the United States was ranked a lofty 20th.

This does not tally with anecdotal experience of US broadband providers.

For starters their equivalent of the ASA doesn’t let carriers market shitty DSL as “full fibre”, and most broadband connections are DOCSIS cable or fiber. I went from 1Gbps symmetrical to 72/20 theoretical (32/16 real) when I moved from San Francisco to London.

5G wont be widely available for 10 more years in the UK, going by the past performances and feet dragging by the networks, topped up by the Trump Diktat on Huawei equipment. (My worldwide research - dont ask me the methodology).

Leadership? My ass. Not in my life time, anyways.

Who is paying these researchers for farting from their mouths?

This report isn't credible... of course Luxembourg has fast internet, it's a tiny state in the middle of the continent.

Take Italy for example: in my house in Bologna i have FTTH with 1gbps, and that's stable, whereas at my parents' house in Sardinia we have a pokey ADSL which is sold to be 20mbps but in a good day reaches 12 (measured wit ookla speedtest).

Mean speed: 506Mbps.

Yep, that's what they do here. Handful of town connections get 8Gb connectios, the rest are on lousy sub 5Mbps DSL or worse. Next minute everyone is patting themselves on the back for the average connection being over 1Gbps.

TIM, the ex state monopoly telco, successfully lobbied the government to crate the "One Network", basically forcing OpenFiber, the company born to deploy FTTH and that won the bids to deploy the state-funded broadband network, to surrender its network and be integrated into a new company of which TIM will own more than 50%, using a shell company to look like a wholesale-only entity, but controlled by the incumbent - basically a return to a monopoly.

That after TIM was fined by the antitrust authority, because it was found using its dominant position to try to hinder OpenFiber FTTH deployment in "market failure" areas which was declared as such after a public consultation with telcos - including TIM - to know which areas would not see any private investments.

TIM lost the bids for the state-funded network because it proposed mostly VDSL (FTTC), while OpenFiber proposed moslty GPON (FTTH).

The reason used was that the network is a "national asset" - so national that TIM major shareholder is Vivendi (and most of its share are held by foreign investors) , and it's selling a 38% stake in the network to the US fund KKR, while another investor that should buy the ENEL partecipation in OpenFiber could be the Australian fund Macquarie. That's because TIM has a 20Bn debt and is desperately looking for cash. The operation is basically a TIM bailout - killing competition, avoiding the quick depreciation of its copper network slowing down the FTTH deployment, and soon making a private company debt a taxpayers one, through the state-owned fund Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.

And you believed Pai and the FCC were bad.... the only hope is Vestager will investigate the affair and find it breaking antitrust laws.

"TIM, the ex state monopoly telco, successfully lobbied the government to crate the "One Network", basically forcing OpenFiber, the company born to deploy FTTH and that won the bids to deploy the state-funded broadband network, to surrender its network"

And how, _exactly_ will they compete with Elon's Skylink system?

Banning it? Yeah right....

Times are about to change and markets which didn't actually have competition are about to start facing at least one real competitor they can't stomp out

Your theory is kind of spoilt a little by the UK's dismal showing. You know the UK? That offshore Tax Haven

This survey is the equivalent of estimating a country’s road traffic journey times by using the average top speed of the vehicles sold there each year.

First error: by using speedtest data, they’re basically just measuring the speed between the user premises and the next hop in the network. That doesn’t tell you about backhaul provision (hi Cable ISPs!) or consistency of service (ibid.). Use an “off-brand” speedtest website and you can see your reported download figures tumble.

The other problem is that measuring speedtests is confounded by pricing structures of the providers more than the actual network capabilities. If providers in Country A give a 20 Mbit service for €15/mo, an 80 Mbit service for €20/mo, and a 200Mbit/sec for €35/mo, people like me will take the cheapest one that exceeds my peak bandwidth requirement (which, incidentally, never rises over 20Mbit/sec). Lots of users living on their own, who want Internet for occasional use will also go for the services with low bandwidth caps on cost grounds. But in another country, where operators only offer the 200 Mbit/sec option for €35/mo in an effort to maximise revenue, that country’s network to be considered faster, even though both are the same capacity.

The only legitimate way of determining this survey's results would have been the hard way: discover the share of domestic connections by carrier type (DOCSYS, xDSL, FTTP, UMTS), and then apply an empircially-derived performance figure per technology (and generation) to those connection counts (thus, a 1 Gbit cable connection scores far, far less than a 1 Gbit FTTP), and look at the amount of trunk network capacity in the country.

TalkTalk and a few others are STILL not offering this

With the increasing number of IPv6-only resources, why won't Ofcom rule that IPv4 is "walled garden", not an ISP?

I can't speak for all the locations mentioned but Jersey's position is surely much more to do with it being a small island, which made ripping out all the old copper and laying fibre everywhere relatively easy. Before they did that, broadband speeds were relatively poor. It probably also helps that Jersey Telecom charges stupid amounts to dial into the island, even from the UK. 18p/minute from a pay monthly EE SIM!

Of course, one could also argue that it's fairly straightforward to deploy FTTP when your country is the size of a regulation five-a-side football pitch

This is the actual and only reason.

I wonder how many 'bad' experiences are down to end user WiFi or even the end device capability, particularly when assessing higher transmission rates.

Having said that, my own direct (and indirect) experience in the UK is that there is a clear line between the connected and unconnected. Averages paint over that dichotomy.