Buffering but better: Australia's broadband is speeding up

Australia’s mean broadband speed has increased by 3.99 Mbps in the past year, moving Australia up three places on a global league table of broadband speeds. Australia sits just outside the top 50 ahead of Kosovo, but behind Turks and Caicos Islands and Serbia. Australia’s mean download speed of 11.69 Mbps is the tenth fastest in the Asia-Pacific region according to the table, well behind the 23.77 Mbps of New Zealand, the fifth fastest country in the region. According to the table, Australians require 58 minutes to download a typical 5gb HD movie, compared with just 28 minutes to download the same file in New Zealand.

The data is the result of approximately 160 million speed tests conducted by M-Lab, a partnership between America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab and other supporting partners.