Statistics show we’re downloading more and increasingly opting for faster connections, but Australia’s average upload speed is behind the global average and may be getting worse

More Australians paying for faster internet, but we're still lagging behind in upload speeds

Australians are increasingly opting to pay for faster internet connections although an analysis of global internet speeds suggests the country is still lagging behind other countries.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics internet activity statistics were released on Tuesday, and show greater demand for faster connections as the overall amount of data downloaded continues to increase exponentially.



Here’s the volume of data downloaded in terabytes over time:



The breakdown of internet connections by type over time shows an increasing proportion of mobile and fixed wireless connections, with dial-up disappearing almost completely:



Despite the increased proportion of mobile and wireless, the share of total data downloaded by these modes is decreasing, with fixed line connections accounting for 97% of all data downloaded:



Australians are increasingly paying for higher speed connections, too. The share of subscribers to internet plans advertising speeds between 8 Mbps and 24Mbps increased by 9.8 percentage points year-on-year, and the highest tier of 24 Mbps or greater increased by 2 percentage points:



As David Ramli points out in the AFR, this is despite the government-funded Vertigan cost-benefit analysis of the NBN predicting most people would only require 15Mbps in 2023.



So, we know Australians are downloading more and increasingly signing up to faster plans. But have average internet speeds in Australia kept pace with other countries?



There are two large datasets on global internet speeds that I know of, Akamai’s State of the Internet reports, and Ookla’s NetIndex. Akamai maintains one of the largest content delivery networks, and they measure the speed of people’s connections to their servers in terms of file downloads. Ookla runs a popular internet speed testing site, and so has measurements of upload and download speeds for a large number of countries. Both datasets will of course differ due to differences in the type of information they collect.



NetIndex’s data suggests Australia’s average download speeds are generally above the world average, but the gap between the two has recently closed somewhat. It also shows where Australia really falls down in a global comparison - upload speeds. We’re consistently under the world average for upload speeds, and the gap has increased in recent months:



If we were to rank Australia by upload speeds, we’ve gone from 48th to 100th from January 2008 to September 2014. The number of countries included in the monthly average can vary though, so I’ve included an adjusted ranking that takes the number of countries into account. This line is flatter, but still increasing:



Akamai’s figures suggest Australia is much closer to the average on download speeds, and Akamai currently ranks Australia as 41st globally out of 100 countries:

If you want to see how the speed values given would actually affect your online activities, check out our interactive that simulates download and upload speeds in different countries.