back to article Hong Kong has fastest broadband on the planet

Asian countries topped the global broadband charts again in the previous quarter, with plucky Hong Kong knocking long-time champ South Korea from its lofty perch to register the fastest services in the world for both mobile and fixed connectivity. The latest quarterly State of the Internet report from content delivery provider …

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  1. Ole Juul

    Interpretation please

    Much of USA is using dialup (about 10%), yet the map says 1% under 250Kbps. Much of Canada is on wireless where hundreds of people share an IP, so those numbers are not indicative of users. Does this State of the Internet report, in fact, have any real meaning? Just asking.

    1. Magister

      Re: Interpretation please

      10% is a large proportion, but I wouldn't describe it as "much of USA" - but a significant amount, yes. And I fully understand the frustration; I've been paying BT for a business connection for the last 3 years to try to get a stable connection that allows me to actually work and it just seems to get worse.

      It's not just about actual bandwidth; they can fudge those figures to do lots of interesting things. For example, I am actually getting about 0.14 Mbps download speed at the moment; really piss poor. BT say that this is acceptable as my "profile" is between 0.1 and 0.25; but that profile figure changes depending on what speed I am actually getting. I've seen it drop to 56K at times.

      But the worst part is that the connection drops in and out seemingly at random. It makes it virtually impossible to carry out any of the work that I want to do; and that means instead of working form home, I have to travel; the additional cost to me now is between £250 and £500 per month.

      We know that the world of work is changing; this is not a new concept, it has been subject to numerous discussions, reports and planning for the last couple of decades. The Western World should be leading this, but the infrastructure is lagging well behind; it simply will not support the newer ways of working. If we cannot provide the necessary means to allow staff to work using the new methods, we will end up losing out to those areas of the world where they are investing more appropriately.

  2. frank ly
    Meh

    re. "..price increases as the market matures and stabilises."

    As a market matures and stabilises, the prices should, if anything, decrease as incumbents streamline their business and prune out ineficiencies.

    Could it be that the incumbents used a lower than rational price to lure customers in, then have a captive herd for forced milking?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Missing an important piece of info really....

    Yes I have a 100MB line up and down (and 1000MB if I want it), which maxes out when I am hitting a HK based usenet server or a .gov.hk website....but the international links are complete garbage, 10MB if you are *really* lucky. iPlayer is buffer-tactic, especially at weekends.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Missing an important piece of info really....

        "Presumably that's a VM connection"

        Reading the original post, it appears to be Hong Kong, so probably not VM....

        1. AndrueC Silver badge

          Re: Missing an important piece of info really....

          Good point. It might even be 100MB then.

  4. arkhangelsk

    I'll be impressed when my '3' (company name) 3G connection

    actually works on the MTR. Reliability is at least as important as speed.

  5. Chris Miller
    Stop

    Stop this nonsense

    It's ludicrous to compare pocket-sized states such as Hong Kong or Singapore, where most of the population lives in high-rise apartments in one conurbation, with the US or UK. By laying a single fibre, a (nominally) gigabit connection can easily be provided for hundreds of households. But (as previously noted), I'd far rather have a 10Mb link that delivers a guaranteed 10Mb 24x7 than a 100Mb link that slows to a crawl in peak periods.

    1. Kool-Aid drinker
      Thumb Up

      Re: Stop this nonsense

      Amen.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stop this nonsense

      An alternative could be to compare capital cities (or "Commercial Capitals" in some cases - eg. Sydney rather than Canberra, New York rather than Washington DC).

    3. Ol'Peculier
      Thumb Up

      Re: Stop this nonsense

      Well, my friend lives in the wonderfully named Tong Fuk in a single building house, and his connection speed was (is) in the range of the figures quoted

      Might be a coincidence that most of the intercontinental cables land there as well...

    4. rhydian

      Re: Stop this nonsense

      Facts like this also skip the fact that the UK has a telephone infrastructure that stretches back 100+ years. I bet South Korea's main networks are 40 years old at worst.

  6. i hate cars

    Useless numbers; pointless report

    These numbers don't prove anything. They fail to take into account infrastructure development, cost, and broadband penetration.

    Here in South Africa the fastest possible home connection we have access to is 40Mbit/s VDSL (which is currently in trial). Let's say that were the only way to get Internet access: the few people who have access to 40Mbit/s lines would then constitute 100% of the people in the country with Internet connections. That would push South Africa (with exorbitant broadband pricing, a landline monopoly, and average infrastructure) to the top of the "WORLD'S FASTEST BROADBAND" charts.

    Which country has the world's fastest broadband? Well, if we narrow it down to consumer offerings the title should go to the US, with Google's 1Gbit/s fibre in Kansas City.

    But pointing out which country has the highest average speed is about as useful as saying "move to this city, it has the highest average speed in peak hour traffic". It's a metric only useful for dickwaving.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Useless numbers; pointless report

      We should also look at availability and take-up. Japan might have high speeds but availability drops off rather sharply outside of cities. Take-up is poor as well as I've pointed out in other replies. In terms of 'bums on seats' the UK is actually in the top ten. To put that another way - the UK has done a very good job of getting its citizens to use the internet. Better than the USA and Japan for instance.

      1. Z80

        Re: Useless numbers; pointless report

        Does anyone have any figures on availability in Japan? I'm not doubting there's a drop-off outside the cities having seen some of the remote places where people live, but then again they do seem fairly prolific at throwing money at infrastructure projects even if only to keep the economy ticking over.

        All I found from a quick bit of searching was an old article stating:

        "Japan expects ubiquitous access for businesses and consumers to high-speed broadband by 2010 - the result of a four-year government programme designed to improve access. "

        Have they managed it or are there still the kind of notspots we have in some places in the UK?

        1. AndrueC Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Useless numbers; pointless report

          You're right that there aren't many recent articles. It does sound though like most places at least have ADSL. And yes, there's been a big build-out push of late.

  7. Tom 7

    Can we measure that in information transfer please.

    I have a 2MB connection cos I live where you cant see the air most of the time. The only time I have problems is when the data is doubly unzipped - 10 minute videos of something that can be explained in 250 characters or iPlayer offering cat explodes which you sit and wait through 5 minutes of someone interviewing twenty shocked neighbours before a still picture of cat vomit.

    I suppose it would be nice to download all this crap at 1G and then I can FF or Rewind at my leisure which would, in reality, save me 10s a day.

    I don't want it NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW! I don't want to download more movies than I can watch in a lifetime. I dont wand a 14 page PDF with 4k of useful text. I dont want 99% of what I'm forced to clock my USB with.

    I'd be happy with noise levels being reduced to a point where I can get some real data out of the signal. 2Mb means a bible every 5 seconds - and most of my bandwidth is about as fucking useful.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Depressing...

    This time last year I was getting a reliable 8-8.5 Meg, now I get 1.0-1.3 Meg, BT thinks this is good!

    I get faster BroadBand using 3G FFS!

    The reason why other countries have faster infastructure than the UK is they don't have B F*kin T running things.

    1. orb8

      Re: Depressing...

      ^ ^ This

  9. Tom 7

    A load of dirigibles

    The US have just launched an airship that can hover at 6km up for weeks at a time. I'm thinking they don't have to hover over people being blown to bits.

    Sod fibre - a few of these and my telescope will be useless but the weather seems to be doing that anyway!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Here in Canada

    I'm on fibre and get 14 to 15Mbps download and around 2.4 to 2.5Mbps upload. I am on a 20Mbps plan. If I am prepared to pay over double my current rate, my download speed could increase to around 250Mbps. 20Mbps, fortunately, is fast enough for Netflix so I'm not inclined to change my plan any time soon. My data cap is 250GB but have not, so far, come close to reaching it. What is annoying, though, is that the service provider has introduced a replacement 20Mbps plan that reduces upload speed to 0.512Mbps and reduces the cap by 50GB.

    I should add, though, that I can get up to 22Mbps download on my 3G data service; depending on location. I should add that we do not have LTE service in our area.

  11. KAMiKZ

    again and again and again and again and again and again.

    there are pukes who want to be fukcing john lennon from places like berkeley who want to meditate 24 hours a day, speaking every sentence peppered with spirituality and therefore can live no where else but some remote ass 4WD-required, 10-miles-from-own-mail-box place.

    Then there are the garden variety rednecks who need their space to practise the greatest 8 seconds

    all in all, you get a fiber-mile / person ratio likely greater than 100, and that person may or may not use your service. Hong Kong, two things, being asiatic city, they are just eager eager eager to not want to appear fallen-behind, they always want to make sure to LOOK sharp, so the gov doesn't mind tossing however much to suppor this sort of infrastructure project. And even in New Territory, the density of people is still greater than probably most cities in NA.

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