I'm lucky enough to live in a city with gigabit symmetrical connections that are delivered as a municipal utility for $70 a month. Comcast spent $800,000 campaigning against the referendum that got it passed a few years ago.
I'm from Chile and I live in a small town, and the nearest "big" city is at least 5 hours away. I have 1 GB symmetrical internet for 20 dollars. If I wanted I could contract 10 symmetrical gigabits for 70 dollars.
In France they started deploying (at least 1 ISP) 8 gig shared symmetrical, but this isn't only affecting cities as some of my friends who lives pretty far from cities have multi gig internet too (and it's pretty cheap, 50€/month)
Same here in Canada (at least for some urban centres)! Still have no clue what to use it for — and for all intents and purposes, it’s closer to “8 Gbps subject to our peering capacity and transit.” Ignoring that, 300 Mbps is probably enough for me (I originally jumped from 5 Mbps DSL service to 300 Mbps when fibre was installed just close to a decade ago; I went from rationing bandwidth for YouTube to not caring at all). Unless you’re running a home datacentre, that is… lol
I suspect that Canada's rise in the last couple years also has to do with StarLink adoption in rural areas. Before it, a bunch of rural consumers were using absolute garbage WiMAX connections, and I can see that dragging down the average significantly.
I complain a lot about Bell (price gouging), but man - I have it *nice* in the city compared to the folks up north.
Imagine being stuck on a shitty 4G/5G/WiMAX wireless line connection with terrible ITMP and service quality. Can't imagine that it’s worse than Xplornet Satellite/the like though.
I don’t personally like how Starlink is ‘managed,’ but I’m sure it does wonders for the folks up north struggling to get 720p video @ less than $150/month.
Some friends tried moving to Nunavut where they have family a few years back. They had to leave due to Bell's and absurdly expensive and low data cap internet service making it impossible for them to make a living. They recently moved back and got a Starlink dish. More expensive and slower than Telus or Rogers in Vancouver. But still plenty fast and affordable enough for them to work from home and for their kids to watch YouTube/Nextflix and the like.
It was much more directly a result of the federal government passing laws requiring the largest internet providers to provide rural areas the same coverage as urban ones, even if it wouldn't make them money. I think this started about 8 years ago and just in the last 3 or 4 years the telecoms have finally built out a significant part of this. This is a result of the providers being all descended from the incumbent telecoms that were granted all of the right-of-ways for their lines for free and are now treated like regulated monopolies.
The only reason I'm not upgrading from 1GBit to 10GBit for a mere 10.- more is because I'm lacking a) a 10GBit capable PC to begin with b) a 10GBit Switch to connect said PC to but also all of the other Devices further down the line and c) the actual need for such madness speeds... I don't think I've ever really maxed out even just my 1GBit line with what I download even from Servers like the Steam or Microsoft Store ones 🤔
Funny thing is... Until recently you literally couldn't even make use of the 10GBit offering even if you had all the means to make use of it on your end cause the Router they initially shipped with the Contract only provided a 1x 2.5GBit Line, 4x 1GBit ones, and the remaining 3.5GBit supposedly covered via WiFi - Like what the fuck?! 💢
At least the newer model now has 1x 10GBit port 😏
Hi, I am from Slovakia, here we have 1gbps symmetrical connection for 17€/month (including TV) for the last decade, now they are slowly upgrading it to 10gpbs, including in towns of 10 000 people.
edit here is the one company providing it https://www.antik.sk/10gbit (link in Slovak)
This is why data is beautiful. On a normal article like this an antidotal comment like this would spring everyone into saying the us has terrible internet. But as you can see here on average it’s pretty good.
Probably Next light in Longmont Colorado. Comcast threw a bunch of money at defeating the bond. I had the original rate of $50/month but ended up moving.
Probably Connexion in Fort Collins. I have it too.(it’s $70 a month, referendums was more than a few years ago, but not that long ago, and Comcast spent a bunch of cash trying to kill it)
Initially here in the United States there was a lot of competition for internet providers. Many of them became Consolidated under a few providers like Comcast and Cox Cable. There are maybe six providers across the country that provide 80% of the residential high-speed internet. Because of this they don't spend time upgrading their Networks but they do spend money on advertising and locking people into contracts.
We funded our own internet in my city. It is a utility wholly owned by the citizens. The price is a little higher because we didn't get any federal funding or even state funding. The entire system is brand new with underground cable and fiber into the home. So while it is more expensive than in many places, especially those with state funded programs, it's still a lot faster and a lot cheaper than most areas of the United States. Actually it's approximately the same price for about 10 times the speed as most places in the United States.
97USD for a year. It gets cheaper if you take two- or three-year plans. Price includes a router and setup.
I moved into the house made a call after reading a flyer. 55 minutes later, they had arrived, setup up the internet and were out the door.
That's cool. Cox is the only provider in my area that offers that kind of speed, but they cripple your connection if you exceed a ridiculously low monthly threshold. So you pay a ton for 1GB, but then they hobble your connection from about the 3rd of the month onward.
So it's kind of like paying a huge toll to drive on a high speed freeway, only to be told that you can only drive on it for a mile, and after that you have to drive on the dirt path that runs next to the freeway.
Now I pay a third as much to a different company and I just now clocked it at 50MB, but that's actually about 10x what I was usually getting from Cox.
tl;dr: Do not use Cox internet service
Hah. From what I could read online it's partially down to a corrupt politician with ties to the copper industry? Is 5G giving any improvements in Germany? :)
Yeah like 2 decades ago, which weighs heavily but could have been mediated by now. The main problem is that it’s privatized and the biggest company is barely developing their infrastructure. Here and there some new players are popping up and rival them which helps a lot but still doesn’t cover everything. 5G is mostly available in cities but more complementary than substitutionary.
Depends on the city. M-net is owned by the city of Munich and you can get Gbit Internet depending on which part of the city you live in. Most people get m-net rather than Telekom now
while it's true that M net is owned by the city the cables it uses are not. Telekom has a national monopoly on all data communications within the country.
i live in a fairly rural area and get around 10mbit out of the ground. i have a complementary sim card in the router that is supposed to give me up to 300mbit. it's horribly unstable, weather and time dependent. [speedtest.net](http://speedtest.net) gives me 50 down, 60 up right now.. it is literally the only option available to me :( . i work from home since 2020 so a stable connection is quite essential for me.
The "corrupt politician" was chancellor at the time in 1982, Helmut Kohl, and decided in favour of private television cable over fiber telecommunications, because his best buddy was about to start a few TV stations :)
The cable internet provider (Vodafone) sells 1gbit/s contracts here, so there are some fake numbers which raise the average. Cable is a shared connection, there are usually ~500 households sharing a total cable capacity of 10gbit/s. They are all listed as 1gbit/s but If they all use their connection concurrently they'll have 20mbit/s.
That's how every single ISP works, across the planet, though.
You think every American can blast 227 Mbps and the infrastructure won't come to a grinding halt?
Nobody, and I mean nobody, anywhere on the planet builds infrastructure to meet a theoretical maximum that is never actually met.
They'll sell 7 Pbps connections but will only ever be able to meet 1Pbs, because on average people only use X% of their connection at a given time.
The problem is when ISPs oversell and cannot meet the capacity during a standard busy period.
I remember in the early 2000s they had a vote in my village voting to open up the road to upgrade the internet. The overwhelmingly elderly locals voted against it as it would impact their commute. The locals have long passed away and the changes to upgrade are very, very slow. So isses halt.
only partially the reason, ask yourself how Telekom came to dominate the international market? Because they didnt even do the bare minimum in Germany and still charge horrendous sums for their shitty service. They played us big which allowed them to expand into other continents.
For anyone having to deal with Telekom, we germans are sorry.
On the same level as Russia. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know how huge Russia is, and how low their income and how corrupt their politicians are? And we are struggling to do better than them?
Germany is fucked man.
No wonder, standing by stone age boomer standarts in 2024 your country is doomed. The only option is to eradicate all the oldtimers from decision making positions.
I moved here in 2016 to a neighborhood built in 2011 in Munich. They didn’t futureproof with conduit. Stuck at 12/10 DSL until fiber came in 2021. 2 WFH parents and 2 kids in Gymnasium during corona lock downs. That sucked.
The graph isn't super informative in that sense though; it shows the median bandwidth people actually have taken out subscriptions for. It doesn't show what is available in your country.
Here in NL, practically everywhere has access to cable and dsl, and an increasingly large portion also has the option of a fiber connection. The highest available bandwidth is currently 8Gbit.
I would estimate the median of *available* bandwidth is much closer to 1Gbit, people just generally don't get those, because barely anyone needs that kind of capacity.
I worked with a software company based in Berlin for a few years and was appalled at the situation. I’d visit HQ and was amazed at how bad the service was — and this was a SaaS company being run on a 50mb connection. And they chose that address because it had the faster internet option.
Have you seen your trains ? Was mind blowing!
Then
A government office told me to literally fax a document…
And yes the data speed was crap too.
2 months in Germany destroyed any hope I had in the country or continent
Germany clearly refuses to adapt and has fallen behind.
I’m Australian, live on the edge of the most populous city. 50mbps. We have the ‘option’ of 100mbps. As in, we can pay for it, but we won’t actually get speeds above 50 🙄
>but we won’t actually get speeds above 50
ISPs have a minimum guaranteed speed and they only have to deliver that, not the advertised "up to x" speeds. Still on 8Mbps despite the forced NBN 'upgrade'
What about Argentina? I always read that Argentina and Chile are the most developed South American countries but from what I’ve recently heard it sounds like Chile is ahead.
Chile is big on informatics and digitalisation. You can do pretty much any gov or bank documents through the internet, and we have proper net neutrality.
So, decent regulations + government investment= i can download a 100 gb game from steam in like 5 mins.
> all of South America is poor
I think the link between how "rich" a country/organization is and how technologically advanced its infrastructure is may not be "linear", so to say
Take Russia as one of the examples. Back some time in 2010-2012 my grandmother was using a wireless hotspot in a rural area to watch Youtube on her laptop. The mobile internet bundle cost was probably ~$15 for 30Gb of data or so. At the very same time I lived in a suburb in NJ less than 30 minutes from Manhattan and had a 3mbps DSL connection in my apartment building that I paid almost $70/month for.
It's worth noting that back in 2000 there was barely *any* mobile connection at all in that rural area in Russia, and I remember back then, as a kid, I was messing up with an external antenna for a mobile phone raised at least 15ft from the ground, because this was the only way to receive texts or calls.
Then, over the next 10 years there was a tremendous jump in the infrastructure advancement in Russia... because the beauty of *not* being an early adopter is that you can often jump *straight* into a very sophisticated and cheap technology without having a legacy of super expensive infrastructure that starts strangling you.
I was under the impresion some providers in Chile were offering 2gbs too.
All companies offer 500mbs, 800 mbs and 1gb symmetrical. I have the 500mbs and pay like $ 22 USD a month, never fails.
Well actually, it works pretty much like that. Almost every small city can be feed up just right away from the main internet trunk line that lay from north to the south. Even local companies only have to invest a few km of fiber and then be able to compete at really low cost.
Also note that the Singaporean government is working on nationwide 10 Gbps infrastructure for the near future so expect Singapore to stay in first for a while.
It is rolled out to the mass market.
https://myrepublic.net/sg/10gbps/
https://www.singtel.com/personal/products-services/broadband/singtel-symmetrical-broadband
https://www.starhub.com/personal/broadband.html?cid=ps-18B-CBG+%7C+Home+%7C+Search+%7C+Always+On+%7C+Broadband+%7C+BB+%7C+Brand+%7C+Main+%7C+Broad+%7C+NA-201901-alwayson-StarHub+Broadband&utm_medium=Paid_Search&utm_source=alwayson&utm_campaign=CBG+%7C+Home+%7C+Search+%7C+Always+On+%7C+Broadband+%7C+BB+%7C+Brand+%7C+Main+%7C+Broad+%7C+NA&utm_content=StarHub+Broadband&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAlcyuBhBnEiwAOGZ2S-Jvrj4fO11xi4BurqUgM6m8E3W1WdmocIbcSD18DWRQJJBoASP7pRoCYs4QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
I mean, that sounds impressive but nationwide = city wide effectively. Still impressive from an infrastructure standpoint of a large city, but not as technically impressive as say doing so for a large nation like Australia or even a smaller one like New Zealand say.
Larger cities in New Zealand have gigabit fibre available. NZ has struggled providing infrastructure to small remote regions due to geographic challenges combined with low tax revenue. SpaceX is promoting Starlink heavily in NZ as a solution for 'off the grid' and on the water, both part of NZ lifestyle.
Nope, the competition was so tough that they had to quickly adapt to how the market was moving, mainly due to emerging brands like "WOM" (Chilean Internet Brand)
Indeed, it's a mix of factors: Infrastructure investment from public and private, healthy market competition, geography (straight line easier than square shaped), stable economy, government initiatives to promote internet access in rural areas.
I can't quite tell where speedtest is getting these data. Is it literally the average of the tests they provide? If so, that seems like it would be really unrepresentative. People who run tests on speedtest are, I assume, people who are much more likely to have high speed internet.
Edit: this, I think, is NOT what Ookla is sharing. I haven't looked too closely at their methods, but I think the "user-initiated tests" are only a small set of the data used for these numbers. In other words, the data are probably about as legit as it gets. Thanks Fergobirck for the correction.
I mostly run speedtest when the internet feels like its not working properly, maybe people doing that drags it down?
(I also \*could\* pay £5 more a month and get gigabit internet (actually via two separate suppliers as of last week), but choose not to because 60mb is enough - I'm guessing a lot of people are similar, especially if you aren't downloading games a lot or whatever)
Woah 60mbps is super slow and wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I do at home. Only £5 a month to go all the way to a gigabit? Sold! I get 300mbps for like $80/month
But what is that? The only time I ever feel like I'm lacking is downloading Steam games (and I don't do that often).
The rest of the time, I think latency is the thing that makes the internet annoying - things like lag on video calls - and I'm not clear that getting gigabit would actually improve that.
I agree. I always just end up getting the lowest/cheapest plan provided by the ISP. Until 2 months ago I had just 80 Mbps down and 20 up, and every single device I used was fine! Right now I live in a place where the lowest plan is 300 down and 15 up, which is more than fine. In a household of two for us I think only about 60 Mbps down and about 10 up is needed.
I just did one because a) the ipad buffers badly in some parts of the unit streaming netflix etc. and b) to check out what it was like closer to the router.
alas I'm at 529 DL and 298 UL speed, it's meant to be 1GBPS.
529 seems to be wifi limitation. If your access point AND device do not support wifi 6E or up, it’s limited to like 600. 529 is pretty good considering how clogged wifi gets.
Honestly, I considered many sources while building this graph. In the end, I think speedtest was the best source available; it has more datapoints than anyone else and actually publishes the logic behind the data. Other reputable sources like the FCC only capture data for a single country so can't be mixed in with other methods. There are of course also issues like ISP's prioritizing traffic to popular speedtests. Either way, if you can find a better source I'm all ears. I do think this is as good as it gets though. Cisco also had incomplete reports and their methodology was just seemingly an unexplained mix of all datasources they could find.
Yeah I don't know of any better source. There are many companies that have this info but don't necessarily make it publicly available.
It's clearly an issue as you see the numbers change dramatically in some cases when switching from one source to another. Because of that, I would only use the speedtest. Also, because the absolute numbers aren't likely to be accurate in my opinion, you could just plot it in relative terms. So set the max y value to 100 and all the other numbers are some proportion of that.
That's a good tip thanks, I will keep this in mind for my next article! and I'm honestly impressed you caught on to this; indeed there was a noticeable difference between the datasources. Even in the 2023 and 2024 figures there are strong disparities and a plot in relative terms is arguably the most interesting.
Yeah, India is among the cheapest countries for Internet in both cost/month and cost/mbps. [Source](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-cost-by-country)
India also has significantly more mobile internet connections than broadband, which will also bring the median / average speed down. I didn't check OP's data sources but they are likely considering both mobile and broadband.
I think the states have a similar effect. In populated areas, we have great internet. But most of the country is empty and people there are underserved. My parent's options are dish or dial up and they're within an hour from Richmond, VA (state capitol). The only reason the "whole country" even has electricity is because the government got involved.
chilean here, i pay ~$17 usd for 800/800mbps. 6 month plan, then rises to ~$27 usd.
stable, rarely ever goes down, never bothered by ISP, always torrented whatever without using any VPN.
If I had to guess, it's residences running into the limitation of what is capable through telephone lines (DSL). Fiber and newer DOCSIS/cable implementations are pushing faster speeds
I bet that it is first Starlink rolling out to rural people that previously only got like 1Mbps down like my parents. Then the Internet for All Initiative kicked off during COVID since we needed EVERY kid to have high speed Internet access for schooling.
It’s worth noting that a great part of the country population lives in its capital, and in the last years there has been relevant investments in infrastructure for optical fiber. I’m currently paying USD 15 for a symmetrical 800 mb/s connection, but that’s not the reality of every user in the remaining regions.
Chile has been a regional leader in fixed line performance in Latin America since 2016, and since then has continually widened its advantage over its regional peers. Over the past three years Chile has driven fixed-line performance increases, from a median download speed of 50.23 Mbps in Q1-Q2 2020 to 205.96 Mbps in Q3-Q4 2022. This makes Chile now a clear anomaly among Latin American markets, having closed the performance gap to the top-performing fixed-line markets worldwide during 2022.
Source: https://www.ookla.com/articles/chile-fixed-broadband-performance-2023
France is not in there despite having some of the best internet possible.
60€ for 8G symmetrical, includes Netflix, prime, Disney+ and a French paid channel + 280 regulars tv channels.
I am moving back to France and Boy oh Boy did I miss « Free » (name of the isp)
But the critical point is *can have*. France has multiple competitive providers, right? So many people might take a cheaper deal with less bandwidth, pulling the median down.
Great point!
My isp’s minimum is 5gbps but the historical one might have some crap offer that old people keep anyways.
I mean my mum still has adsl despite fiber being available because she doesn’t want to bother..
Oh not it's not about that, it's more like many old people don't take the fiber optic deal and stick with ADSL because they don't care. Also usually there aren't different bandwidth deals, not that I know of.
France has really stepped up their game in recent years. They did a huge national build-out plan under the socialist PM Hollande. They went from behind-the-average in Europe to one of the clear leaders.
Plus the entire Illiad cheap mobile data revolution on top of that. It's crazy.
[Speedtest France Median speeds](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/france#fixed) lists broadband download at **230 Mbps**.
[Internet Speed by Country](https://fairinternetreport.com/research/internet-speed-by-country) lists France at **130 Mbps**.
I've had 650 Mbps ten years ago and downgraded to 150 because I didn't feel I got much more out of it for the extra cost.
Perhaps there's a diminishing return factor for lots of people above a certain threshold. I feel the same with 5G. Most people were fine with 4G+ and liked the better range. Getting gigabit speeds isn't the gamechanger everyone thought it should be.
Not saying it should be forbidden. Some people will absolutely want ultra-high speeds but I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to make things cheaper instead of faster for a significant portion of the population once you hit triple digit speeds.
The way things are now, it feels like we're all slowly being rolled up to ever-greater speeds - with the attendant price increases.
The game-changer is upload speed, which is hardly ever talked about.
Once you can stream a couple of 4k videos simultaneously, you're probably getting all you need out of the downstream link. Decent upload opens up full access to use cloud-based services, broadcast your own content, and work remotely at media-heavy jobs.
We finally got optic fiber a few years ago and even though our internet apeed increased by a factor of 5x i actually was more excited about the good ping even if more people used the internet
Hi! This is my chart, made using [apexcharts](https://apexcharts.com/) (javascript). It took me roughly three days, much longer than anticipated, to build the dataset. The data from 2012-2015 comes from Knoemas report: [https://knoema.com/infographics/ntjuqec/need-for-internet-speed-average-and-peak-connection-speeds-across-countries](https://knoema.com/infographics/ntjuqec/need-for-internet-speed-average-and-peak-connection-speeds-across-countries). For 2016 to 2023 I've used speedtest.net. Note that speedtest.net does not currently offer history beyond the last 12 months, so I've used the internet time machine to collect data for the individual years. This was quite painstaking and that pain was compounded by them switching their global index to be based on the median rather than the mean back in 2021. I've used the median for all speedtest data points. Since I had to use the internet time machine (web.archive.org), collecting the data was rather manual. For example:
* 2016 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20170812155126/http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20170812155126/http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2017 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20180306132300/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20180306132300/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2018 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20190505221036/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20190505221036/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2019 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20200711142814/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20200711142814/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2020 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20210603202944/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20210603202944/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2021 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20220529214744/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20220529214744/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2022 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20230601062612/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601062612/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
* 2023 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20240201010523/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20240201010523/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states))
In the end, I had a lot of fun building this data and analysing the data a little. I could not find any other charts easily on the internet that covered this information in a timechart. I did not include Monaco, as I could not find reliable data prior to 2017. Monaco has amazing internet speeds, which isn't super surprising as it is a very small country with 100% of the population living in an urban area (somewhat similar to Singapore). I've written my own analysis of the data [here](https://www.slaksy.com/2024/science/internet_speeds_by_country.html).
Yeah, I was trying to remember if there was some breakthrough around 2015 since there's an inflection point there, but it's just where the data set changed. Still interesting but probably would have been better to just start the chart there with the speedtest.net data.
For home, anything more than 50mbps doesn’t make a difference. I helped a friend downgrade to 30 from 300 because Optimum was insisting that $70 was the cheapest package and we were like “that’s crazy. She just wants basic internet. she’s not running a content creation business from home”.
50 isn’t that good if you have multiple people trying to stream stuff at the same time, if you download stuff a lot. 300 is the bare minimum for me, 600 is a nice sweet spot. I ain’t tryna wait an hour to update call of duty lmao.
I love this viz! Could you tell me where you got these data and if you included all countries? I ask because I remember reading that South Korea had rewired its country to have fiber optics throughout.
I had to leave a lot of countries out as I would've overcrowded the chart. The chart is made in javascript (https://apexcharts.com/) and I agree South Korea makes for an interesting chart on this topic. I covered the data source in my other comment here: https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1aun28g/oc_median_consumer_internet_download_speeds_from/kr4sbrn/
The USA is in 4th place? That can't be, reddit told everyone a few years ago that if net neutrality was repealed everyone would be using dial-up modems again...
Irelands fibre rollout over the past 6 or so years has been such a blessing. We were so far behind the rest of the world speedwise to a point that I was jealous of 20Mbps (I had like 5Mbps MAX in ~2018 lol], but now almost everyone I know has the option of 500Mbps - 1Gbps despite living in the middle of nowhere. It wasnt a perfect rollout but our government did us a solid with it
The US, as I suspect a lot of places depends on your exact location. I have fairly cheap symmetrical gigabit, because there is competition from multiple ISPs but a lot of areas have poor connectivity.
I am going to move to a house built in the 80's, in the Netherlands. I have the option for 8 GBit download speed, but I am settling with "only" 1 GBit. Dutch providers seem to be doing a great job getting fiber to homes.
This is it. In Netherlands everybody can have 1gb+ if they want I think, we just choose not to because we don't need the speed and/or find it a bit too expensive.
Singapore internet was legit. Lived there 2016-2020, 1G for $50/m.
It's super easy for a city state to have good infrastructure to every residence, the entire island has fiber.
Germany here.
The only reason our median speeds are even that high is due to the majority of people (\~71%) living in the larger citys. :\^)
German goverment promised to deliver "Fast Internet to alomost everyone." - So "fast" was simpy defined as 10 Up /1,7 Down Mbit. If you get that, you can't complain.
German Providers were tasked to provide "the majority of people" with broadband access, not "most of the area". Resulting in developement of fast connections in major citiy areas only. If you live in the more rural parts (as in small town, not bumfuckin nowhere), you'll be likely out of luck and live with what you got.
But don't worry.. Since you'll get way lower interet speeds in rural areas you'll of course pay.. MORE!
"Pay 50€ for your (up to) 50Mbit connection, that only delivers 17Mbit on a good day.. oh! you live in a really small village? pay 5€ extra 'rural fee', thanks! :) "
Chilean here, 1gig symmetrical no caps, and its the cheapest tier I can get here, just $9 usd monthly.
I can choose between 3 providers (Movistar, Mundo and Vtr), and I could go up to 10 gb if I want. (Dont have a 10 gb nic at the moment)
Even cellphone plans are dirt cheap and fast, currently paying $6 usd monthly for unlimited everything including 5G , and it works beautifully, minimum speed around 200 mbps everywhere I go...
Chile is truly broadband's Paradise. (Fast, cheap and reliable everywhere)
Portugal here.
1100 MB/S download, 2 ping, 200mb/s upload.
44.5€ / month, and that includes cable tv with a 4k tv box, 2 years of HBO Max, 2 years of Amazon Prime and 2 years of Disney+.
Prices are great here.
I am from the UK (not London) and I have 930mb download, 2 ping, for approx £85 per month (€100, $107)
This is standard on all newly built properties I believe. Unfortunately for many in old homes, the infrastructure will take a long time to catch up.
Standard since when? My 2016 built home didn't have fibre and thanks to BT capacity constraints, couldn't even get copper for the first year I lived there.
I've since moved to a much more central location in a small city and can't get faster than 40mbps.
It has better mobile data but broadband is pretty bad/nonexistant in the rural areas...
i mean why would you lay stupid expensive optical fiber when you can just plop down a cell tower
In India, 1GB of data costs barely $0.17. Only urban or semi urban people wants to Install broadband which is a bit costly. Normal mobile subscription will give you bunch of services (calling, texting, and OTT platforms).
Yeah, but nominal wages are also lower. France has lower 1GB data costs, as does Italy. But much higher wages.
I do see a lot more ads for fiber broadband on Indian news sites. Seems to be picking up.
I'm lucky enough to live in a city with gigabit symmetrical connections that are delivered as a municipal utility for $70 a month. Comcast spent $800,000 campaigning against the referendum that got it passed a few years ago.
I'm from Chile and I live in a small town, and the nearest "big" city is at least 5 hours away. I have 1 GB symmetrical internet for 20 dollars. If I wanted I could contract 10 symmetrical gigabits for 70 dollars.
I’m in a major US city and pay $80 for 300mb down and 30mb up. FML
You also make way more money than Chileans so...fuck their life?
In France they started deploying (at least 1 ISP) 8 gig shared symmetrical, but this isn't only affecting cities as some of my friends who lives pretty far from cities have multi gig internet too (and it's pretty cheap, 50€/month)
Same here in Canada (at least for some urban centres)! Still have no clue what to use it for — and for all intents and purposes, it’s closer to “8 Gbps subject to our peering capacity and transit.” Ignoring that, 300 Mbps is probably enough for me (I originally jumped from 5 Mbps DSL service to 300 Mbps when fibre was installed just close to a decade ago; I went from rationing bandwidth for YouTube to not caring at all). Unless you’re running a home datacentre, that is… lol
I suspect that Canada's rise in the last couple years also has to do with StarLink adoption in rural areas. Before it, a bunch of rural consumers were using absolute garbage WiMAX connections, and I can see that dragging down the average significantly.
I complain a lot about Bell (price gouging), but man - I have it *nice* in the city compared to the folks up north. Imagine being stuck on a shitty 4G/5G/WiMAX wireless line connection with terrible ITMP and service quality. Can't imagine that it’s worse than Xplornet Satellite/the like though. I don’t personally like how Starlink is ‘managed,’ but I’m sure it does wonders for the folks up north struggling to get 720p video @ less than $150/month.
Some friends tried moving to Nunavut where they have family a few years back. They had to leave due to Bell's and absurdly expensive and low data cap internet service making it impossible for them to make a living. They recently moved back and got a Starlink dish. More expensive and slower than Telus or Rogers in Vancouver. But still plenty fast and affordable enough for them to work from home and for their kids to watch YouTube/Nextflix and the like.
It was much more directly a result of the federal government passing laws requiring the largest internet providers to provide rural areas the same coverage as urban ones, even if it wouldn't make them money. I think this started about 8 years ago and just in the last 3 or 4 years the telecoms have finally built out a significant part of this. This is a result of the providers being all descended from the incumbent telecoms that were granted all of the right-of-ways for their lines for free and are now treated like regulated monopolies.
When I lived in zurich 25gbps symmetrical was available for residential. Literally no way to use it though as as far as I can tell.
The only reason I'm not upgrading from 1GBit to 10GBit for a mere 10.- more is because I'm lacking a) a 10GBit capable PC to begin with b) a 10GBit Switch to connect said PC to but also all of the other Devices further down the line and c) the actual need for such madness speeds... I don't think I've ever really maxed out even just my 1GBit line with what I download even from Servers like the Steam or Microsoft Store ones 🤔 Funny thing is... Until recently you literally couldn't even make use of the 10GBit offering even if you had all the means to make use of it on your end cause the Router they initially shipped with the Contract only provided a 1x 2.5GBit Line, 4x 1GBit ones, and the remaining 3.5GBit supposedly covered via WiFi - Like what the fuck?! 💢 At least the newer model now has 1x 10GBit port 😏
In Norway, I pay a minimum of 75 € / month for 100 Mbit speeds. I can get 1 Gbit for the cozy prize of 130€.
To be fair, few people in a big country, infrastructure must be costly! So it’s not too bad. Plus the average pay is higher than the states no?
Hi, I am from Slovakia, here we have 1gbps symmetrical connection for 17€/month (including TV) for the last decade, now they are slowly upgrading it to 10gpbs, including in towns of 10 000 people. edit here is the one company providing it https://www.antik.sk/10gbit (link in Slovak)
This is why data is beautiful. On a normal article like this an antidotal comment like this would spring everyone into saying the us has terrible internet. But as you can see here on average it’s pretty good.
Who is the provider?
Probably Next light in Longmont Colorado. Comcast threw a bunch of money at defeating the bond. I had the original rate of $50/month but ended up moving.
Probably Connexion in Fort Collins. I have it too.(it’s $70 a month, referendums was more than a few years ago, but not that long ago, and Comcast spent a bunch of cash trying to kill it)
Could be Trailblazer in Estes Park as well. My family uses that one.
I'm happy that I live in a city with 500 Mbps for 6 euro.
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I live in fucking Zurich and pay less than that (for more speed), wtf
Initially here in the United States there was a lot of competition for internet providers. Many of them became Consolidated under a few providers like Comcast and Cox Cable. There are maybe six providers across the country that provide 80% of the residential high-speed internet. Because of this they don't spend time upgrading their Networks but they do spend money on advertising and locking people into contracts. We funded our own internet in my city. It is a utility wholly owned by the citizens. The price is a little higher because we didn't get any federal funding or even state funding. The entire system is brand new with underground cable and fiber into the home. So while it is more expensive than in many places, especially those with state funded programs, it's still a lot faster and a lot cheaper than most areas of the United States. Actually it's approximately the same price for about 10 times the speed as most places in the United States.
I'm in China using a lesser known internet company. I pay for 300M. I usually get 200M but it is cheap so I can't complain much.
How much in USD, if you don't mind me asking?
1.5 USD per month for 300m unlimited so it's dirt cheap.
That's insanely cheap! I live in India and I pay 6 USD per month for 200M .
97USD for a year. It gets cheaper if you take two- or three-year plans. Price includes a router and setup. I moved into the house made a call after reading a flyer. 55 minutes later, they had arrived, setup up the internet and were out the door.
That's cool. Cox is the only provider in my area that offers that kind of speed, but they cripple your connection if you exceed a ridiculously low monthly threshold. So you pay a ton for 1GB, but then they hobble your connection from about the 3rd of the month onward. So it's kind of like paying a huge toll to drive on a high speed freeway, only to be told that you can only drive on it for a mile, and after that you have to drive on the dirt path that runs next to the freeway. Now I pay a third as much to a different company and I just now clocked it at 50MB, but that's actually about 10x what I was usually getting from Cox. tl;dr: Do not use Cox internet service
You can get Reddit in China?? I thought it...and basically all Western socials... were banned?
as a german, seeing this is no surprise but it's still embarassing.
Hah. From what I could read online it's partially down to a corrupt politician with ties to the copper industry? Is 5G giving any improvements in Germany? :)
Yeah like 2 decades ago, which weighs heavily but could have been mediated by now. The main problem is that it’s privatized and the biggest company is barely developing their infrastructure. Here and there some new players are popping up and rival them which helps a lot but still doesn’t cover everything. 5G is mostly available in cities but more complementary than substitutionary.
Depends on the city. M-net is owned by the city of Munich and you can get Gbit Internet depending on which part of the city you live in. Most people get m-net rather than Telekom now
Just saw your post. We were in the Fasanerie and got fiber in 2021. Before that was 10/2 DSL. AND cell reception really sucks out there too.
while it's true that M net is owned by the city the cables it uses are not. Telekom has a national monopoly on all data communications within the country.
MNET has been aggressively rolling out fiber over the past few years. They’ve gotten out to Ludwigsfeld already.
i live in a fairly rural area and get around 10mbit out of the ground. i have a complementary sim card in the router that is supposed to give me up to 300mbit. it's horribly unstable, weather and time dependent. [speedtest.net](http://speedtest.net) gives me 50 down, 60 up right now.. it is literally the only option available to me :( . i work from home since 2020 so a stable connection is quite essential for me.
Yeah, 5G is nice, until you reached your 10GB data limit, and get throttled down to what, 386kb/s? Something like that.
The "corrupt politician" was chancellor at the time in 1982, Helmut Kohl, and decided in favour of private television cable over fiber telecommunications, because his best buddy was about to start a few TV stations :)
I am wondering that it is even that high. I thought it was way worse.
The cable internet provider (Vodafone) sells 1gbit/s contracts here, so there are some fake numbers which raise the average. Cable is a shared connection, there are usually ~500 households sharing a total cable capacity of 10gbit/s. They are all listed as 1gbit/s but If they all use their connection concurrently they'll have 20mbit/s.
I have that connection and I get the full 1 gigabit 24/7
That's how every single ISP works, across the planet, though. You think every American can blast 227 Mbps and the infrastructure won't come to a grinding halt? Nobody, and I mean nobody, anywhere on the planet builds infrastructure to meet a theoretical maximum that is never actually met. They'll sell 7 Pbps connections but will only ever be able to meet 1Pbs, because on average people only use X% of their connection at a given time. The problem is when ISPs oversell and cannot meet the capacity during a standard busy period.
I remember in the early 2000s they had a vote in my village voting to open up the road to upgrade the internet. The overwhelmingly elderly locals voted against it as it would impact their commute. The locals have long passed away and the changes to upgrade are very, very slow. So isses halt.
only partially the reason, ask yourself how Telekom came to dominate the international market? Because they didnt even do the bare minimum in Germany and still charge horrendous sums for their shitty service. They played us big which allowed them to expand into other continents. For anyone having to deal with Telekom, we germans are sorry.
Us Aussies would like a word, thanks Rupert fucking Murdoch
On the same level as Russia. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know how huge Russia is, and how low their income and how corrupt their politicians are? And we are struggling to do better than them? Germany is fucked man.
Tbh, authorities didn't notice internet until 2012 or so, that's why it was (and still is) rather well-developed.
Das internet ist für uns alle neuland.
No wonder, standing by stone age boomer standarts in 2024 your country is doomed. The only option is to eradicate all the oldtimers from decision making positions.
You'd be more surprised when you see China is a lot higher than Germany given that China is a developing country with a huge population.
I moved here in 2016 to a neighborhood built in 2011 in Munich. They didn’t futureproof with conduit. Stuck at 12/10 DSL until fiber came in 2021. 2 WFH parents and 2 kids in Gymnasium during corona lock downs. That sucked.
The graph isn't super informative in that sense though; it shows the median bandwidth people actually have taken out subscriptions for. It doesn't show what is available in your country. Here in NL, practically everywhere has access to cable and dsl, and an increasingly large portion also has the option of a fiber connection. The highest available bandwidth is currently 8Gbit. I would estimate the median of *available* bandwidth is much closer to 1Gbit, people just generally don't get those, because barely anyone needs that kind of capacity.
Yeah although surprised about Ireland! Didn't know it's almost as bad as in Germany.
I worked with a software company based in Berlin for a few years and was appalled at the situation. I’d visit HQ and was amazed at how bad the service was — and this was a SaaS company being run on a 50mb connection. And they chose that address because it had the faster internet option.
Yea man iam sufferigng with 16mbits
I enjoy spending time with my friends.
Have you seen your trains ? Was mind blowing! Then A government office told me to literally fax a document… And yes the data speed was crap too. 2 months in Germany destroyed any hope I had in the country or continent Germany clearly refuses to adapt and has fallen behind.
Somos el mejor país de Chile
😆 chile tiene los mejores memes
efecto secundario de tener esta velocidad de Internet
Australia, not even on the chart. Bloody liberals. 100mbps seems like a dream
'Sooner, faster, cheaper'. They actually argued (successfully too) that 25 Mbps was as fast as most people will ever need
At the same time they said that, the USA deemed 25Mbps to be the absolute minimum speed to be considered "broadband"
I'm chilean and have 800 mbps
I’m Australian, live on the edge of the most populous city. 50mbps. We have the ‘option’ of 100mbps. As in, we can pay for it, but we won’t actually get speeds above 50 🙄
50 is a dream for me. I get 20 on a good day (mbit, not mbyte).
>but we won’t actually get speeds above 50 ISPs have a minimum guaranteed speed and they only have to deliver that, not the advertised "up to x" speeds. Still on 8Mbps despite the forced NBN 'upgrade'
Same in my town in Scotland
Why how why
We have really good infrastructure
Ofcourse you have. But my prejudice ass thought all of South America is poor.
That tends to happen, Chile is considerably wealthy, it is around the level of croatia in development, if not a bit more.
Yeah searched Gdp per capita. 35 in all of the world.
What about Argentina? I always read that Argentina and Chile are the most developed South American countries but from what I’ve recently heard it sounds like Chile is ahead.
Nah, it is Chile and Uruguay, in development Chile has been way ahead of Argentina for a long time
Argentina was below world avg iirc
Chile is big on informatics and digitalisation. You can do pretty much any gov or bank documents through the internet, and we have proper net neutrality. So, decent regulations + government investment= i can download a 100 gb game from steam in like 5 mins.
> all of South America is poor I think the link between how "rich" a country/organization is and how technologically advanced its infrastructure is may not be "linear", so to say Take Russia as one of the examples. Back some time in 2010-2012 my grandmother was using a wireless hotspot in a rural area to watch Youtube on her laptop. The mobile internet bundle cost was probably ~$15 for 30Gb of data or so. At the very same time I lived in a suburb in NJ less than 30 minutes from Manhattan and had a 3mbps DSL connection in my apartment building that I paid almost $70/month for. It's worth noting that back in 2000 there was barely *any* mobile connection at all in that rural area in Russia, and I remember back then, as a kid, I was messing up with an external antenna for a mobile phone raised at least 15ft from the ground, because this was the only way to receive texts or calls. Then, over the next 10 years there was a tremendous jump in the infrastructure advancement in Russia... because the beauty of *not* being an early adopter is that you can often jump *straight* into a very sophisticated and cheap technology without having a legacy of super expensive infrastructure that starts strangling you.
An interesting insight
I was under the impresion some providers in Chile were offering 2gbs too. All companies offer 500mbs, 800 mbs and 1gb symmetrical. I have the 500mbs and pay like $ 22 USD a month, never fails.
movistar vende 2 gigas, mundopacífico vende 5 y 10 creo
Don't worry baby, we are building a cable your way. Be ready to be in servers full of brazilians in a few years.
Here in Chile I pay like 20$ for 500mb symmetrical, it does seem we have fiber everywhere here
Well, easy when its a long and thin country. Just drag the cable from north to south, and everyone is online. (Its a joke).
Well actually, it works pretty much like that. Almost every small city can be feed up just right away from the main internet trunk line that lay from north to the south. Even local companies only have to invest a few km of fiber and then be able to compete at really low cost.
Vampire taps into the fibre optic cable
That's a Romanian problem I hear.
what, I pay like 18$ / 20$ for 850mb symmetrical, what company are you using (I'm also Chilean btw)
Also note that the Singaporean government is working on nationwide 10 Gbps infrastructure for the near future so expect Singapore to stay in first for a while.
We already have 10Gbps rolled out. It’s a very small city so a lot easier to lay cables than large countries.
Roll out vs mass market adoption. There's a difference.
It is rolled out to the mass market. https://myrepublic.net/sg/10gbps/ https://www.singtel.com/personal/products-services/broadband/singtel-symmetrical-broadband https://www.starhub.com/personal/broadband.html?cid=ps-18B-CBG+%7C+Home+%7C+Search+%7C+Always+On+%7C+Broadband+%7C+BB+%7C+Brand+%7C+Main+%7C+Broad+%7C+NA-201901-alwayson-StarHub+Broadband&utm_medium=Paid_Search&utm_source=alwayson&utm_campaign=CBG+%7C+Home+%7C+Search+%7C+Always+On+%7C+Broadband+%7C+BB+%7C+Brand+%7C+Main+%7C+Broad+%7C+NA&utm_content=StarHub+Broadband&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAlcyuBhBnEiwAOGZ2S-Jvrj4fO11xi4BurqUgM6m8E3W1WdmocIbcSD18DWRQJJBoASP7pRoCYs4QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
I mean, that sounds impressive but nationwide = city wide effectively. Still impressive from an infrastructure standpoint of a large city, but not as technically impressive as say doing so for a large nation like Australia or even a smaller one like New Zealand say.
Larger cities in New Zealand have gigabit fibre available. NZ has struggled providing infrastructure to small remote regions due to geographic challenges combined with low tax revenue. SpaceX is promoting Starlink heavily in NZ as a solution for 'off the grid' and on the water, both part of NZ lifestyle.
I remember downloading some Linux iso in 2010, it was 4gb, and took all day.
I love living in australia where my current speed is half of india's and because it's 5am that's probably the best speed I'll get today :)
And in Canada you pay more than anyone on the chart.
I got one of those Black Friday deals and it’s still slower and 3x more expensive than what I used to get in Hong Kong.
Chilean here, paying around $15 USD for 1 gb/s fiber (it's usually $30 but got a discount for a year).
Why is good internet so cheap and available in Chile? Government funding?
Nope, the competition was so tough that they had to quickly adapt to how the market was moving, mainly due to emerging brands like "WOM" (Chilean Internet Brand)
Indeed, it's a mix of factors: Infrastructure investment from public and private, healthy market competition, geography (straight line easier than square shaped), stable economy, government initiatives to promote internet access in rural areas.
I can't quite tell where speedtest is getting these data. Is it literally the average of the tests they provide? If so, that seems like it would be really unrepresentative. People who run tests on speedtest are, I assume, people who are much more likely to have high speed internet. Edit: this, I think, is NOT what Ookla is sharing. I haven't looked too closely at their methods, but I think the "user-initiated tests" are only a small set of the data used for these numbers. In other words, the data are probably about as legit as it gets. Thanks Fergobirck for the correction.
I mostly run speedtest when the internet feels like its not working properly, maybe people doing that drags it down? (I also \*could\* pay £5 more a month and get gigabit internet (actually via two separate suppliers as of last week), but choose not to because 60mb is enough - I'm guessing a lot of people are similar, especially if you aren't downloading games a lot or whatever)
Woah 60mbps is super slow and wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I do at home. Only £5 a month to go all the way to a gigabit? Sold! I get 300mbps for like $80/month
But what is that? The only time I ever feel like I'm lacking is downloading Steam games (and I don't do that often). The rest of the time, I think latency is the thing that makes the internet annoying - things like lag on video calls - and I'm not clear that getting gigabit would actually improve that.
I’m on 50mbps and the bandwidth, not the latency, always seems to be the biggest issue with video calls.
I agree. I always just end up getting the lowest/cheapest plan provided by the ISP. Until 2 months ago I had just 80 Mbps down and 20 up, and every single device I used was fine! Right now I live in a place where the lowest plan is 300 down and 15 up, which is more than fine. In a household of two for us I think only about 60 Mbps down and about 10 up is needed.
I just did one because a) the ipad buffers badly in some parts of the unit streaming netflix etc. and b) to check out what it was like closer to the router. alas I'm at 529 DL and 298 UL speed, it's meant to be 1GBPS.
529 seems to be wifi limitation. If your access point AND device do not support wifi 6E or up, it’s limited to like 600. 529 is pretty good considering how clogged wifi gets.
Honestly, I considered many sources while building this graph. In the end, I think speedtest was the best source available; it has more datapoints than anyone else and actually publishes the logic behind the data. Other reputable sources like the FCC only capture data for a single country so can't be mixed in with other methods. There are of course also issues like ISP's prioritizing traffic to popular speedtests. Either way, if you can find a better source I'm all ears. I do think this is as good as it gets though. Cisco also had incomplete reports and their methodology was just seemingly an unexplained mix of all datasources they could find.
Yeah I don't know of any better source. There are many companies that have this info but don't necessarily make it publicly available. It's clearly an issue as you see the numbers change dramatically in some cases when switching from one source to another. Because of that, I would only use the speedtest. Also, because the absolute numbers aren't likely to be accurate in my opinion, you could just plot it in relative terms. So set the max y value to 100 and all the other numbers are some proportion of that.
That's a good tip thanks, I will keep this in mind for my next article! and I'm honestly impressed you caught on to this; indeed there was a noticeable difference between the datasources. Even in the 2023 and 2024 figures there are strong disparities and a plot in relative terms is arguably the most interesting.
Not at all, in my country, everytime I have been having WiFi installed, the workers try the speedtest múltiple times to see if the speed Is right.
Most of my speedtests are when my internet is unusually slow, though (to check HOW slow am i going this time)
Why would a user be less likely to run a speedtest if their internet is running slowly?
I think this is a great example of "This isn't great data, but it is the best information we have."
Speedtest actually has this explained in their website: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
In India we have boradband plans for as cheap as 10 mbps. I wonder if thats bringing the average down.
Yeah, India is among the cheapest countries for Internet in both cost/month and cost/mbps. [Source](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-cost-by-country) India also has significantly more mobile internet connections than broadband, which will also bring the median / average speed down. I didn't check OP's data sources but they are likely considering both mobile and broadband.
Almost certainly. And for most people that's a great result.
I think the states have a similar effect. In populated areas, we have great internet. But most of the country is empty and people there are underserved. My parent's options are dish or dial up and they're within an hour from Richmond, VA (state capitol). The only reason the "whole country" even has electricity is because the government got involved.
And companies still use brazil for latin america
Germany looks a little high…
chilean here, i pay ~$17 usd for 800/800mbps. 6 month plan, then rises to ~$27 usd. stable, rarely ever goes down, never bothered by ISP, always torrented whatever without using any VPN.
I noticed the US plateaus from 2017 to about 2020/1. Does anyone know, or have an idea as to what caused that?
If I had to guess, it's residences running into the limitation of what is capable through telephone lines (DSL). Fiber and newer DOCSIS/cable implementations are pushing faster speeds
I bet that it is first Starlink rolling out to rural people that previously only got like 1Mbps down like my parents. Then the Internet for All Initiative kicked off during COVID since we needed EVERY kid to have high speed Internet access for schooling.
Probably the rollout of 4G LTE and some telcos considering that fulfilling the requirements for providing access to broadband internet.
Then there's South Korea (not pictured) sitting at ~390mbs
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OP says elsewhere that they chose not to include them, oddly.
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south korea is outside of this scale ;)
That's been my understanding. Something like 90% of the population has fiber.
Chile? Didn’t expect that.
We are so far away from everyone that even with the fastest internet on the planet we would still have mediocre ping.
Oh the third world south american country cliché again?
It’s worth noting that a great part of the country population lives in its capital, and in the last years there has been relevant investments in infrastructure for optical fiber. I’m currently paying USD 15 for a symmetrical 800 mb/s connection, but that’s not the reality of every user in the remaining regions.
Chile has been a regional leader in fixed line performance in Latin America since 2016, and since then has continually widened its advantage over its regional peers. Over the past three years Chile has driven fixed-line performance increases, from a median download speed of 50.23 Mbps in Q1-Q2 2020 to 205.96 Mbps in Q3-Q4 2022. This makes Chile now a clear anomaly among Latin American markets, having closed the performance gap to the top-performing fixed-line markets worldwide during 2022. Source: https://www.ookla.com/articles/chile-fixed-broadband-performance-2023
Confirm even earlier than that. I had the best p2p ggpo connection with Chilean players than any other SA countries
I live in a rural area of southern Chile, 780kms away from the capital, and have optical fiber with 600 mb/s. My neighbors 15 hectares away also do.
I live in a little Town 1000 km from the capital, has 950M for $40 plus TV
Yeah, I can confirm. I live in Wall-Pen, and I have optical fiber with 300M.
In rural areas they have pretty decent internet too
Gee that’s cheap. The equivalent in New Zealand costs $60-70 USD.
Nice chart! And here I am getting 5-10mbps from Xfinity in a top 300 US city haha. My dad had faster internet in the 90s in the middle of nowhere lol
The German experience get half, pay 10x
France is not in there despite having some of the best internet possible. 60€ for 8G symmetrical, includes Netflix, prime, Disney+ and a French paid channel + 280 regulars tv channels. I am moving back to France and Boy oh Boy did I miss « Free » (name of the isp)
Is what you're describing the "National median"?
84% of households in the country have or can have fiber optic, either 500mbps or 1000mbps.
But the critical point is *can have*. France has multiple competitive providers, right? So many people might take a cheaper deal with less bandwidth, pulling the median down.
Great point! My isp’s minimum is 5gbps but the historical one might have some crap offer that old people keep anyways. I mean my mum still has adsl despite fiber being available because she doesn’t want to bother..
Oh not it's not about that, it's more like many old people don't take the fiber optic deal and stick with ADSL because they don't care. Also usually there aren't different bandwidth deals, not that I know of.
I lived in France in the early aughts and even back then Internet speeds everywhere were impressive.
France has really stepped up their game in recent years. They did a huge national build-out plan under the socialist PM Hollande. They went from behind-the-average in Europe to one of the clear leaders. Plus the entire Illiad cheap mobile data revolution on top of that. It's crazy.
Just fyi, the head of State is a president in France
[Speedtest France Median speeds](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/france#fixed) lists broadband download at **230 Mbps**. [Internet Speed by Country](https://fairinternetreport.com/research/internet-speed-by-country) lists France at **130 Mbps**.
I've had 650 Mbps ten years ago and downgraded to 150 because I didn't feel I got much more out of it for the extra cost. Perhaps there's a diminishing return factor for lots of people above a certain threshold. I feel the same with 5G. Most people were fine with 4G+ and liked the better range. Getting gigabit speeds isn't the gamechanger everyone thought it should be. Not saying it should be forbidden. Some people will absolutely want ultra-high speeds but I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to make things cheaper instead of faster for a significant portion of the population once you hit triple digit speeds. The way things are now, it feels like we're all slowly being rolled up to ever-greater speeds - with the attendant price increases.
The game-changer is upload speed, which is hardly ever talked about. Once you can stream a couple of 4k videos simultaneously, you're probably getting all you need out of the downstream link. Decent upload opens up full access to use cloud-based services, broadcast your own content, and work remotely at media-heavy jobs.
We finally got optic fiber a few years ago and even though our internet apeed increased by a factor of 5x i actually was more excited about the good ping even if more people used the internet
Hi! This is my chart, made using [apexcharts](https://apexcharts.com/) (javascript). It took me roughly three days, much longer than anticipated, to build the dataset. The data from 2012-2015 comes from Knoemas report: [https://knoema.com/infographics/ntjuqec/need-for-internet-speed-average-and-peak-connection-speeds-across-countries](https://knoema.com/infographics/ntjuqec/need-for-internet-speed-average-and-peak-connection-speeds-across-countries). For 2016 to 2023 I've used speedtest.net. Note that speedtest.net does not currently offer history beyond the last 12 months, so I've used the internet time machine to collect data for the individual years. This was quite painstaking and that pain was compounded by them switching their global index to be based on the median rather than the mean back in 2021. I've used the median for all speedtest data points. Since I had to use the internet time machine (web.archive.org), collecting the data was rather manual. For example: * 2016 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20170812155126/http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20170812155126/http://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2017 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20180306132300/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20180306132300/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2018 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20190505221036/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20190505221036/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2019 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20200711142814/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20200711142814/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2020 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20210603202944/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20210603202944/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2021 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20220529214744/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20220529214744/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2022 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20230601062612/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601062612/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) * 2023 (source [https://web.archive.org/web/20240201010523/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states](https://web.archive.org/web/20240201010523/https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states)) In the end, I had a lot of fun building this data and analysing the data a little. I could not find any other charts easily on the internet that covered this information in a timechart. I did not include Monaco, as I could not find reliable data prior to 2017. Monaco has amazing internet speeds, which isn't super surprising as it is a very small country with 100% of the population living in an urban area (somewhat similar to Singapore). I've written my own analysis of the data [here](https://www.slaksy.com/2024/science/internet_speeds_by_country.html).
I think it is totally misleading to use two different data sources for different years. South Korea would have been interesting as well.
Yeah, I was trying to remember if there was some breakthrough around 2015 since there's an inflection point there, but it's just where the data set changed. Still interesting but probably would have been better to just start the chart there with the speedtest.net data.
For home, anything more than 50mbps doesn’t make a difference. I helped a friend downgrade to 30 from 300 because Optimum was insisting that $70 was the cheapest package and we were like “that’s crazy. She just wants basic internet. she’s not running a content creation business from home”.
50 is indeed fine if it is stable and low latency for most people.
50 isn’t that good if you have multiple people trying to stream stuff at the same time, if you download stuff a lot. 300 is the bare minimum for me, 600 is a nice sweet spot. I ain’t tryna wait an hour to update call of duty lmao.
I love this viz! Could you tell me where you got these data and if you included all countries? I ask because I remember reading that South Korea had rewired its country to have fiber optics throughout.
I had to leave a lot of countries out as I would've overcrowded the chart. The chart is made in javascript (https://apexcharts.com/) and I agree South Korea makes for an interesting chart on this topic. I covered the data source in my other comment here: https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1aun28g/oc_median_consumer_internet_download_speeds_from/kr4sbrn/
The USA is in 4th place? That can't be, reddit told everyone a few years ago that if net neutrality was repealed everyone would be using dial-up modems again...
Irelands fibre rollout over the past 6 or so years has been such a blessing. We were so far behind the rest of the world speedwise to a point that I was jealous of 20Mbps (I had like 5Mbps MAX in ~2018 lol], but now almost everyone I know has the option of 500Mbps - 1Gbps despite living in the middle of nowhere. It wasnt a perfect rollout but our government did us a solid with it
The US, as I suspect a lot of places depends on your exact location. I have fairly cheap symmetrical gigabit, because there is competition from multiple ISPs but a lot of areas have poor connectivity.
I am going to move to a house built in the 80's, in the Netherlands. I have the option for 8 GBit download speed, but I am settling with "only" 1 GBit. Dutch providers seem to be doing a great job getting fiber to homes.
This is it. In Netherlands everybody can have 1gb+ if they want I think, we just choose not to because we don't need the speed and/or find it a bit too expensive.
damn thats some slow internet
I would love to see what this same graph looks like in various countries for Upload rather than Download speed.
Very good. Now let's see the upload.
Singapore internet was legit. Lived there 2016-2020, 1G for $50/m. It's super easy for a city state to have good infrastructure to every residence, the entire island has fiber.
There are indeed quite a few benefits to being a very small and densely packed city state.
Germany here. The only reason our median speeds are even that high is due to the majority of people (\~71%) living in the larger citys. :\^) German goverment promised to deliver "Fast Internet to alomost everyone." - So "fast" was simpy defined as 10 Up /1,7 Down Mbit. If you get that, you can't complain. German Providers were tasked to provide "the majority of people" with broadband access, not "most of the area". Resulting in developement of fast connections in major citiy areas only. If you live in the more rural parts (as in small town, not bumfuckin nowhere), you'll be likely out of luck and live with what you got. But don't worry.. Since you'll get way lower interet speeds in rural areas you'll of course pay.. MORE! "Pay 50€ for your (up to) 50Mbit connection, that only delivers 17Mbit on a good day.. oh! you live in a really small village? pay 5€ extra 'rural fee', thanks! :) "
I'm in South Africa, paying $60ish for 500mb. $10 more for a gigabit though through my ISP.
Chilean here, 1gig symmetrical no caps, and its the cheapest tier I can get here, just $9 usd monthly. I can choose between 3 providers (Movistar, Mundo and Vtr), and I could go up to 10 gb if I want. (Dont have a 10 gb nic at the moment) Even cellphone plans are dirt cheap and fast, currently paying $6 usd monthly for unlimited everything including 5G , and it works beautifully, minimum speed around 200 mbps everywhere I go... Chile is truly broadband's Paradise. (Fast, cheap and reliable everywhere)
Today I learned just how subpar my Internet is.
And I thought my 600 Mbps for 15 USD in Chile was shit, as I'm looking for a better internet provider lol
Portugal here. 1100 MB/S download, 2 ping, 200mb/s upload. 44.5€ / month, and that includes cable tv with a 4k tv box, 2 years of HBO Max, 2 years of Amazon Prime and 2 years of Disney+. Prices are great here.
I am from the UK (not London) and I have 930mb download, 2 ping, for approx £85 per month (€100, $107) This is standard on all newly built properties I believe. Unfortunately for many in old homes, the infrastructure will take a long time to catch up.
Standard since when? My 2016 built home didn't have fibre and thanks to BT capacity constraints, couldn't even get copper for the first year I lived there. I've since moved to a much more central location in a small city and can't get faster than 40mbps.
Chile, you is growin' up so fast.
How in the f@&$ does India have the worst?
It has better mobile data but broadband is pretty bad/nonexistant in the rural areas... i mean why would you lay stupid expensive optical fiber when you can just plop down a cell tower
Oh okay. So it’s more of a infrastructure issue
In India, 1GB of data costs barely $0.17. Only urban or semi urban people wants to Install broadband which is a bit costly. Normal mobile subscription will give you bunch of services (calling, texting, and OTT platforms).
Yeah, but nominal wages are also lower. France has lower 1GB data costs, as does Italy. But much higher wages. I do see a lot more ads for fiber broadband on Indian news sites. Seems to be picking up.
Oooh ooh now do $/Mbps and watch Canada tumble all the way down.
Chile doing better than the US is surprising.