Now the news is even getting worse as it has officially been announced that South Africa is the only country in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region which fails to meet basic broadband standards.
According to the latest Akamai State of the Internet report South Africa’s average broadband speed and average peak broadband speed significantly declined quarter-over-quarter.
Akamai’s State of the Internet report is based on data gathered from the company’s “Intelligent Platform”, and provides insights into global connectivity and Internet metrics.
The latest report showed that South Africa performed dismally when it came to broadband speeds and broadband adoption rates.
According to the report, the global average connection speed remained 4.5Mbps, virtually unchanged from the third quarter. South Korea has the highest average connection speed at 22.2Mbps, despite a 12% decline from the third quarter.
South Africa recorded an average broadband speed of 3.2Mbps – the only country in the EMEA region which failed to meet the “broadband” threshold of 4Mbps. A further shock was that South Africa showed a decline in average broadband speeds – down 9.9% quarter-to-quarter.
In 2009 a Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old homing pigeon armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from Telkom’s. Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent only 4% of the data.
For a complete analysis with ranking graphs CLICK HERE to visit mybroadband.co.za
