Pickup in mobile surfing speeds here
PUBLISHED ONOctober 18, 2013 1:24 AMByAdrian Lim
SINGAPORE - Singapore's mobile surfing speeds have increased by over 70 per cent in a year but it still lags behind those of some regional countries, going by a second-quarter report on Internet traffic released on Wednesday.
An analysis of the connection speeds of a network provider in Singapore - which was not named - showed that the average speed was 2.4Mbps in the second quarter of this year.
This was a 73 per cent increase from 1.39Mbps a year ago.
The average peak connection - which is the average maximum speed a user can expect to achieve - also increased by 73 per cent from 7.9Mbps to 13.7Mbps.
The figures, reflected in the latest State of the Internet report by cloud-platform provider Akamai Technologies, cover usage via smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices connected to the Internet through mobile networks.
It is based on traffic data collected by Ericsson.
While Singapore's mobile connectivity has shown significant growth, the connection speeds lag behind those of some mobile providers in Asian countries and territories like Malaysia and Hong Kong (see table).
The average connection speed for one provider in Hong Kong was 3.6Mbps, while the peak speed was 20Mbps. In Malaysia, one provider had an average connection speed of 3.4Mbps, and a peak of 39.8Mbps. None of the mobile providers were named.
Senior analyst Clement Teo, from research firm Forrester Research, said the differences in average connection speeds between countries "aren't great".
He added that a 1-2Mbps difference in speeds between countries will likely not be noticeable for users. But speeds could be slower, depending on the cell site and the number of users it can support simultaneously. Speeds also differ according to the number of mobile-broadband subscribers on a network.
"Singapore's network operators have actually invested continually to bring the speeds up, even though there is a higher density (of mobile-broadband users) compared to developing markets," said Mr Teo.
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