The Macau SAR holds the 7th fastest internet network speed globally and the fastest in Asia, a report carried out by British company Cable.co.uk states.
Cable.co.uk provides comparisons of broadband, TV, landline and mobile packages from the UK’s leading broadband, TV, phone and mobile providers.
The company has established a global league table of internet network speeds derived from over 1.1 billion speed tests carried out in the 12 months up to June 30, 2021 and spanning 224 countries.
The research was designed and compiled by Cable.co.uk, and the data was gathered by M-Lab, an open source project with contributors from civil society organisations, educational institutions, and private sector companies.
M-Lab is led by teams based at Code for Science and Society, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google, Princeton University’s PlanetLab, and other supporting partners.
Under the study, the five countries with the fastest internet in the world are Jersey (274.27Mbps), Liechtenstein (211.26Mbps), Iceland (191.83Mbps), Andorra (164.66Mbps) and Gibraltar (151.34Mbps).
“All five are within Western Europe and all are either very small or they are island nations. It is much easier to roll out FTTP full fibre broadband and 5G mobile internet to a smaller population and/or across a smaller area,” the report notes.
Some 27 countries were measured in the Asia region, which measured a regional average speed of 29.11Mbps, with the fastest average speeds measured in Macau (128.56Mbps, 7th), Singapore (97.61Mbps, 11th), and Japan (96.36Mbps, 13th).
A total of 6,972 sped tests were carried out and 2,005 unique IPs, with the report considering that an HD movie of 5GB in size would take some 5 hours and 18 minutes to download in Macau.
As a reference, the report states that downloading an HD movie of 5GB in size would take 2m 29s at the average speed experienced in table-topper Jersey, while it would take 22 hours in last-placed Turkmenistan.
Thes same company has also previously carried out a study that assessed the average cost of one gigabyte (1GB), which calculated and compared from over 6,000 mobile data plans in 230 countries, in which the Macau SAR ranked 203rd at US$1.92 per 1GB.
The five most expensive countries in terms of the average cost of 1GB of mobile data are Equatorial Guinea (49.67), Falkland Islands (44.56), Saint Helena (39.87), São Tomé and PrÃncipe (30.97) and Malawi (25.46).
Meanwhile, the five cheapest countries in terms of the average cost of 1GB of mobile data are Israel (0.05), Kyrgyzstan (0.15), Fiji (0.19), Italy (0.27), and Sudan (0.27).
