Broadband in Oceania ranks among most expensive in world [1]
Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 18:30. Updated on Friday, January 26, 2018 - 19:07.
Data from 3,351 individual broadband packages was gathered by BDRC Continental and compiled and analysed by Cable.co.uk during the eight-week period up to 12 October 2017. The ranking puts the least expensive services at the top of the table and the most expensive at the bottom. Papua New Guinea the second most expensive ranked 195 for a broadband service that costs USD$593.28 per month.
Meanwhile, Cook Islands, Vanuatu, American Samoa, Micronesia (Federated States of), New Caledonia, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia were all ranked 100 and below out of 196 countries. Fiji was the cheapest in the region at $57.45 per month, ahead of both New Zealand and Australia for cost.
At the top of the table, the cheapest broadband prices are found in Iran and Ukraine paying on average around USD$5.36 and USD$5.38 per month respectively. The most expensive broadband in the world is found in Burkina Faso, ranked at 196 paying USD$972.26 per month showing a huge disparity of broadband prices.
Tonga
Tonga on the other hand, was not ranked due to limited information available. Eran Sandhu from Cable.co.uk told Matangi Tonga that some countries were left off the list because they lacked either any comparable service or offered only one or two packages. “For this reason, Tonga was excluded,” she said.
“I can confirm we were unable to find any fixed line broadband in Tonga, only WiMAX and mobile, and for this reason we were unable to make a comparison against other countries for worldwide rankings.”
Broadband speed ranking
Interestingly, the cost of broadband per month does not have anything to do with the speed of broadband.
The country with the fastest broadband speed is Singapore with a download speed of 55.13Mbps according to Cable.co.uk data released in August this year. Yemen has the worst download speed averaging 0.34Mbps.
Oceania countries download speeds averaged across the table with New Zealand ranked at 30 with a download speed of 16.6Mbps and Australia ranked 55 at 7.7Mbps. Vanuatu ranked the lowest in the region at 184 with a download speed of only 0.63Mbps.