Australia’s broadband speeds have increased by more than 25 per cent in the last year, largely due to the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN), but the country still remains well behind New Zealand, according to the Akamai First Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet Report.
Based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which covers approximately 70 per cent of all internet traffic, the report covers connection speeds, broadband adoption, notable Internet disruptions, IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 implementation in each country.
The company noted that Australia has made considerable progress in the last 12 months showing a 26 per cent year on year increase in average connection speeds and a 27 per cent rise in peak speeds on the same time last year.
This resulted in Australia climbing back to 50th in global rankings form 51st in the previous report as the NBN passed the 5 million premises mark on 31 May.
"We are building the NBN network and activating end users faster than we have ever done before and are currently making over 60,000 premises serviceable each week,” NBN chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan said in a statement.
“We have the flexibility and the right technologies in place to design and build the network at the speed and scale needed to reach our end goal by 2020.”
The report comes on the same day nbn co. released a new discount model for the Connectivity Virtual Circuit (CVC) charge network retail service providers (RSPs) pay for service bandwidth.
Under the industry average model retailers had been paying $15.25/Mbps per CVC unit. Under the new model they will be able to achieve discounts based on how much CVC they purchase per end-user.
However, the country’s connectivity is still being put to shame by our trans-Tasman neighbour as New Zealand now ranks 27th in the world and is expected to increase that lead as it continues the rollout of its state-owned Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) network.
Australia is above the global average of 7.2 Mbps at 11.1, and is improving faster that the 15 per cent average year on year increase.
The last iteration of the report showed that, Australia did see a 0.5 Mbps increase in the last three months of 2016, with average speeds crossing the 10 Mbps threshold for the first time, hitting 10.1 Mbps, the increase this quarter was 1 Mbps.
In a regional context, the report said yearly growth in Asia-Pacific was positive across the board except for South Korea, which recorded 0.4 per cent decline but is still the world leader in connection speeds.
Vietnam and China saw the biggest yearly growth, with adoption levels rising an impressive 1,222 per cent and 1,146 per cent respectively, compared with one year prior. Akamai said six additional countries/regions more than doubled their adoption levels compared with the preceding year, while Hong Kong posted the smallest yearly growth in the region at 13 per cent.
