In a study conducted by Cable.co.uk in August, Bangladesh ranked 195th in the world in terms of mean download speed scoring only 3.74 Mbps, falling behind countries such as Iraq, Venezuela, Palestine, and Lebanon.
According to the report, after surveying around 106,126 unique IPs in Bangladesh, it was found that it takes on average more than three hours to download a movie of five gigabytes in the country.
Neighbouring countries such as Myanmar ranked 173rd with an average download speed of 6.68 Mbps while India ranked 76th with 32.44 Mbps.
A total of 27 countries were measured in the Asia (Near East) region, which clocked in at a regional average speed of 43.31Mbps.
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (0.94Mbps, 219th), Afghanistan (0.98Mbps, 216th), and China (2.78Mbps, 207th) were the slowest in the region, with Timor-Leste (0.94 Mbps) and Afghanistan (0.98 Mbps) in the bottom ten countries in the world.
Two of the bottom five are located in Asia, and all of them suffer from underdeveloped network infrastructure and low uptake of digital services among their populations, as per the report.
Research designed and compiled by Cable.co.uk, and gathered by M-Lab, an open source project with contributors from civil society organizations, educational institutions and private sector companies, the results were published in August, after analyzing 276m broadband speed tests in 207 countries.
The five countries with the fastest internet in the world are Macau (262.74Mbps), Jersey (256.59Mbps), Iceland (216.56Mbps), Liechtenstein (166.22Mbps) and Gibraltar (159.9Mbps).
Four of the five countries with the fastest internet are within western Europe, with Macau in Asia being the exception. All of those countries were either very small or are island nations where it was much easier to roll out FTTP full-fibre broadband and 5G mobile internet to a smaller population and across a smaller area according to Cable.co.uk
“As an IT/ITES exporting business, the current network speed is not sufficient to sustain businesses in the sector, as we have been facing a large volume of call drops due to poor broadband connections,” Omar Shariff, the managing director of Bytetrek told Dhaka Tribune.
“Even in July, although the quality of our service was assessed higher than the previous month, we lagged behind in addressing call volumes, which was low as calls dropped because of poor service by ISPs,” he further stated.
According to the top brass of the IT company, such factors drive global clients to shift to other competing markets such as Vietnam, India and others that do not have such issues.
On top of that, tracking broadband speed measurements in 220 countries and territories (224 last year) across multiple 12-month periods has allowed the platform to generate an overall average speed for the globe and to see how this number changes over time.
According to the platform, the global average speed continues to rise fast.
Last year (2021) the global average speed rose again by another 20% to 29.79 Mbps and this year, the average is now 34.79 Mbps – a 15% rise.
The average global broadband speed measured during 2017 was 7.40 Mbps. The average global broadband speed measured during 2018 was 9.10 Mbps – a rise of 23.35%. In 2019, the average speed measured was 11.03Mbps – a further rise of 20.65% over the previous year.
In 2020, the average rose again by another 90% to 24.83 Mbps, though it should be noted that much of this rise can be attributed to upgraded measurement tools, the report said.
