Hiiraan Online
Wednesday August 9, 2017
People use computers at an internet cafe in the Hodan area of Mogadishu, 9 October, 2013. REUTERS
Mogadishu (HOL) - A test of broadband speeds by cable.co.uk has revealed that Somalia ranks 184th out of 189 countries. Based on the research, Somalia scored a mean download speed of 0.62Mbps.
Singapore, a wealthy but small city state in south-east Asia, has the fastest internet speed in the world according to the ranking with a download speed of 55.13Mbps.
Yemen, which is in the middle of a civil war, has the slowest internet in the world with downloading at 0.34Mbps.
Downloading the 7.5GB movie would take 18 minutes and 34 seconds at the average speed experienced in Singapore while it would take users over two days to download the same movie in Yemen.
The top 10 is dominated by Scandinavia and northern European countries with Hong Kong (9th) and Taiwan (3rd) make a strong showing.
The United States was 21st, with a download rate of 20 Mbps, while Canada was 26th, the United Kingdom was 31st and Australia was further down the list at 55th.
Kenya has the fastest broadband Internet speed in Africa coming it at 51. Morocco and South Africa are ranked 79th and 80th respectively.
Somalia is not too far from neighbours Ethiopia (147th) and Djibouti (151st) and Yemen (189th) despite being one of the last countries to go online.
The five fastest countries have download speeds close to 40x faster than the five slowest.
The rankings are based on data that was collected over a one year period leading up to 10 May this year by M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, and Princeton University's PlanetLab.
While the rest of the world was going online, Somalia was embroiled in a civil war that spanned two decades. It finally received its first fibre optic connection through Liquid Telecom in November 2013. According to Internet Live Stats, Somalia’s internet penetration is just 1.7% of the entire population in 2016, but it did enjoy a steady increase of 11.3% and 12.7% between 2012-2014 and 4.6% between 2015 - 2016.
You can get a full copy of the report here