Ireland remains in slow lane on broadband speeds, survey finds

Further evidence that Ireland is still very much in the slow lane when it comes to fast broadband has emerged with yet another study showing the country lags behind many other nations for internet connectivity.

Ookla, which operates Speedtest.net, a website that enables users to check their internet speed, has begun compiling a monthly report covering both fixed and mobile broadband.

The new index is a publicly available resource that is updated at the beginning of every month with data from the millions of real consumer-initiated tests taken using Speedtest in the previous month.

The data for July ranks Ireland in 37th place globally out of 133 countries for fixed broadband speeds and in 53rd spot out of 122 countries for mobile internet.

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Ireland fell one spot in the rankings for both fixed and mobile broadband compared with June with average download speeds of 35.63 megabits per second (Mbps) and 19.82 Mbps respectively.

Singapore is ranked in first place for fixed broadband with download speeds of 154.38 Mbps, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, Iceland and Romania.

Norway is first for mobile internet with download speeds of 52.59 Mbps, followed by the Netherlands, Hungary, Singapore and Malta.

A second report published earlier this week by comparison website cable.co.uk covering 63 million tests, placed Ireland in 36th place out of 189 countries with a mean download speed of 13.82 Mbps. At this rate it would take 73 minutes to download a 7.5GB HD movie.

Business group Isme this week criticised Ireland's poor broadband performance warning that the lack of good internet connectivity was having an impact on job creation.

Fixed broadband subscriptions in Ireland increased to 1.36 million in the final three months of 2016, according to ComReg. This marks a 3.9 per cent increase versus the same period a year earlier.

Average fixed broadband speeds continue to increase, albeit slowly. At the end of the fourth quarter, about 78 per cent of all fixed broadband subscriptions in Ireland were equal to or greater than 10Mbps up from 72.7 per cent in the prior year. About 64.9 per cent of subscriptions were equal to or greater than 30Mbps, up from 56.1 per cent.