Despite the rollout of our much-vaunted NBN, Australia’s internet speed remains somewhere between ‘pretty slow’ and ‘try restarting and see if that helps’. In fact, according to figures published by Fairfax, we rank 44th in the world for average connection speed.
The most recent State Of The Internet report shows that Australia’s average connection speed fell to 6.9 mpbs in the third quarter of 2014, placing us behind a number of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand.
While Netflix is officially launching its Australian streaming service next month, the report shows that only around two thirds of Australian internet users have the 10-20 mbps speeds required for the service’s 4K videos.
Given that a recent Netflix demonstration in Sydney was scuttled by poor internet speeds, this news is not as surprising as you’d think, and the company have already said that their “adaptive streaming” will reduce video quality if networks are found to be “congested.”
If you are reading this on a broadband connection, the page probably took 4.23 seconds to load, and if you’re on mobile, you probably had 4.799 seconds to kill. In fact, count yourself lucky to be online at all, given that the other day, a data center in Perth straight-up overheated, sending thousands of users temporarily back to the dark ages.
If your internet’s up to snuff, then go ahead and celebrate by watching this, because it’s never not a good time for Celery Man:
