NBN woes: Study shows Australia lags most of Europe and some African countries in download speeds

Amid all the controversy surrounding slow NBN speeds, a new report shows that Australia is at 55th position for download speeds, behind Estonia, Kenya, Bahamas, Cyprus and Ukraine.

Figures from Cable.co.uk, which used data from M-Lab, show the country lags behind most of Europe.

Australia’s a mean download speed is 7.7 mbps, according to an article in the Herald Sun.

Singapore topped the list with a download speed of 55.13Mbps.

For comparison, a 7.5GB movie can download in 18 minutes and 34 seconds in Singapore while in Australia it would take two hours and 12 minutes based on the mean speed.

Director of Melbourne Networked Society Institute Professor Thas Nirmalathas said Australia’s population could be slowing the country down but internet service providers are partly to blame.

“A big factor is that internet service providers are not keeping up their investment to be consistent with the NBN investment,” he said.

“The NBN debate has been running a long time and other countries have managed to speed up their deployment so that’s why we are behind.”

Professor Nirmalathas said the NBN would improve the connectivity between the home and exchange point but much work was to be done to achieve that.

“You have to be careful when comparing the statistics as we are a vast population and it’s not comparing apples versus apples, but Australia should be able to do better than it is.”

The year-long study collected data from 63 million tests of broadband speeds from around the word.

Recently, another report suggested that if telcos paid just $9.75 extra a month per connection, speeds for the National Broadband Network would vastly improve.