Despite the continued rollout of the NBN, Australia remains at a measly rank 50 in Akamai’s quarterly State of Internet Connectivity Report.

Akamai measures and ranks various metrics via its worldwide content delivery systems, and produces a quarterly report that showcases not only download speeds, but also connectivity quality, and trends in the data caused by world events, such as the Olympics.

The report for Q3 2016 shows that the average download speed for Australia was 9.6 Mbps, up 13% from Q2, but only 3.3 Mbps above the overall global average.

This result places us almost 20 Mbps behind world leader South Korea, and even 1.4 Mbps behind the developing country of Kenya.

While the NBN has provided an increase of 23% over the previous year, the NBN Co. revealed that mid-last year, only 7% of customers had elected to receive the top-tier speed service, while 89% were fine with the cheaper < 25 Mbps speeds. Along with this, the report reveals that 23% of Australians are still on an average connection speed below 4 Mbps, or almost 40% below that of the global average speed of 6.3 Mbps.

Although these results for fixed line connections show Australia lagging behind most of the world, the 4G mobile infrastructure puts Australia at the forefront: beating out all other countries in the Asia Pacific region, as well as countries like U.S.A. and many European countries. While this feat does showcase the excellent adoption of 4G technologies, mobile data plans continue to suffer from heavy data caps, and remain unsuitable for sustained usage.

The NBN Co. plans to have the NBN rollout completed by 2020, and while improvements to connectivity have been noted, it appears Australia is still some time away from breaking away from its notoriously slow connection speeds.

If you’d like advice on whether you should adopt an NBN connection, or explore more business-grade options, please get in touch with our Altitude Innovations Team.

Written by Brendan Cole