Internet speeds around the world

The internet can be a fickle thing. There’s no one size fits all and no uniform connection speed to serve the entire planet.

Of course website performance falls under a number of variables, including the user’s proximity to the server and the optimization of the website. Some things, however, are out of our control. Many areas of the world have an average connection speed that will determine how well those cities and countries can access the internet. Akamai, the content delivery network responsible for serving up to 30% of all web traffic, recorded the average internet speeds per country in the first quarter of 2015. The full data can be found in their state of the internet report, or you can check out the average speeds for each country on the map below by clicking on the desired area with your mouse. The darker areas indicate faster speeds.

Some of the data can be skewed, as the number of IP addresses an area is hosting will affect speed. For the official ranking Akamai only took into account countries with at least 25,000 unique IP addresses. Going on those parameters, the countries that landed in the top ten for fastest internet speeds are listed below.

We set up our own Real Browser Checks to record the website performance in those regions for ourselves. We used checkpoints within the host country and accessed a Google server that was also based in that region. We were unable to collect data from Latvia, however, as we currently do not have a checkpoint based in that country.

As you can see, our own data corroborates that these countries have lightning fast internet speeds. Finland loaded the webpage in just under 1.6 seconds, and Hong Kong managed to load their site in 0.2 seconds. Where did your neighborhood land for internet speed? Let us know in the comments!

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