Kenya has the second fastest broadband speeds in Africa after Madagascar according to a report by UK’s broadband provider Cable. Globally, Madagascar ranked 22 while Kenya dropped 13 places from position 51 to the 64th place. Madagascar’s ranking moved up 67 places from position 89 in 2017. South Africa ranked 76th globally followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe at position 105, 112, 120, and 121 respectively.
Kenya has a mean download speed of 10.11 Mbps in 2018 compared to 8.83 Mbps in 2017. The average time it takes to download a typical 5GB HD movie in Kenya is 1 hour 7 minutes and 30 seconds while the same movie can be downloaded in Madagascar in only 27 minutes.
The high speeds in Madagascar are thanks to underwater EASSy cable that provides broadband services to urban areas in the country. EASSy is a 10,000 kilometre submarine fibre optic system installed along the East and South coast of Africa.
The report reads: “Most other African nations are not so lucky, with 7 out of the 38 included nations having to get by on average speeds of less than 1Mbps.”
Global Broadband Speeds
Singapore is leading the world with average download speeds of 60.30Mbps and it has maintained the same ranking compared to 2017. However, the mean download speeds increased from 55.13 Mbps.
The top ten countries following Singapore are Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hungary, and Jersey in that order.
The rankings were based on 163 million speed tests in 200 countries. The data was collected from June 2017 to May 2018 by “M-Lab, a partnership between New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab and other supporting partners.”
