Fortunately, or unfortunately, when we travel we start to see the discrepancies between download and upload speeds from country to country.  Some national providers keep us happy, and then there are the times like when I was on a small island in Indonesia and I needed to download a file … and it just wasn’t happening.  I was ready to throw a coconut at my MacBook Air!

 

So it was with interest that I read Akamai’s quarterly report (3rd quarter 2010) on The State of the Internet.  Not surprisingly, Asia is paving the way for ever-faster broadband and mobile speeds, investing heavily in infrastructure, while the ‘developed’ world is lagging behind.

 

 

‘From a global connection speed perspective, South Korea continued to have the highest level of ‘high broadband’ (>5 Mbps) connectivity, with 72% of connections to Akamai at speeds above 5 Mbps. South Korea also maintained the highest average connection speed, at 14 Mbps, and recorded the highest average peak connection speed, at 39 Mbps. Cities in South Korea and Japan continued to hold many of the top spots in the rankings of highest average and average peak connection speeds by city as well.’

 

A positive trend from the reports is that in the 3rd quarter in 2010, all of the top 10 countries, including the USA, achieved average connection speeds that met or exceeded the ‘high broadband’ threshold of 5 Mbps.

 

 

Not surprisingly, 75% of the top 100 cities with the highest average connections speeds were also in Asia.  This includes 61 cities in Japan, 13 in South Korea, and Hong Kong.  Europe accounted for only ten cities across five countries, down from 15 cities across eight countries in the previous quarter. The remaining 15 cities were in North America, with two in Canada and 13 in the United States. Within the United States, five of the 15 were in California.

 

 

The rankings are not dissimilar when it comes to mobile connectivity.  Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong were toping the list.  South Korea, which was number one in all of the mobile connectivity rankings, has an Average Connection Speed of 14 Mbps.

 

However, given that there are several mobile providers within a country, several of the bigger countries had very large discrepancies between the slowest and fastest mobile connection speeds.

 

 

As I was perusing all this data, the question that popped into my head is ‘how fast is fast enough?’.  I’m not quite sure why Singapore is at the bottom of these lists for I’ve always had very fast broadband and mobile connection speeds in the Lion City, very much comparable to the top countries in the list above.  It’s also true that I pay extra for faster speeds so it makes me wonder if Singapore has a tiered program, where on average internet speeds are capped for the basic user, then are the comparison speeds in the tables above also broadband and mobile speeds of the most basic subscription plans?

 

The telecoms in Singapore recently did a survey as to why users weren’t upgrading to faster broadband speeds, although they are available.  The primary reason given was that average users didn’t understand why they needed more spped.  Why spend the money!

 

I often use www.speedtest.net to check my broadband download/upload connection speeds and one thing I’ve learnt is that if I connect to a server in Singapore (keep in mind I live in Singapore), I most often will hit download speeds of 75-90 Mbps.  However, if I connect with a server in the US or Europe, the speed quickly drops down to 5 – 20 Mbps.  The adage here is that given that most content is still provided on American and European servers, your internet connection is only as fast as the ‘weakest link’.  All the door-to-door fiber optics in Singapore won’t be able to give me quicker access to a server in San Francisco if the underwater broadband cables have a limited bandwidth.

 

So we come back to the question of how much speed do we actually need?  A movie downloads in 3-4 minutes on my broadband at home.  I stream radio programs on my iPhone at the gym with no problems.  I watch YouTube clips on my 3G iPad and most of the time I have continuos streaming.  True, I don’t play games, but for my current needs, I really can’t see why I would require more speed than I already have.

 

Then again, we have this ingrained human need for more, more, more.  As soon as a benchmark is set, we need to surpass it.  Once we hit 30Mbps we want 100Mbps.  So let’s just go for it.  Bring on the speed!  At least my movies will stream faster.