The Australian government’s Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research (BCARR) commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to develop a new way of ranking countries’ broadband speeds, which just so happened to have Australia come out on top.
BCARR argues that countries cannot easily be compared based on delivered end-user speeds as they’re vastly different in their populous and geographical size. A country such as South Korea for example has a high density of population over a relatively small surface area, which according to the newly developed comparison, means they’re not fit to be compared to Australia’s sparse landscape.
The same thinking coincidently means that nearly all consistently top-ranking countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong are wiped from the comparison list. What’s left are 17 rag-tag competitors, which includes the likes of Canada, USA, New Zealand and the UAE.
The report then denotes Australia ranks atop the list when comparing the number of connections available to its population that can achieve 25Mbps. A benchmark that warrants nothing more than a collective moan to any modern standard today.
As pointed out by Chris Duckett at ZDNet, if the comparison is done at 100Mbps, Australia has a sharp fall from grace with not even the newly developed metric saving them as they fall sharply to 10th.