Pakistan has over 2.9 million broadband subscribers, up from 2
million just few months ago. These numbers are only bound to increase
after expected 3G rollout. However, with this growing trend in broadband
subscribers, the performance of Internet speeds in Pakistan isn’t very
impressive.
According to a
new report by Ookla, the people behind
speedtest.net,
in terms of internet speeds worldwide Pakistan stands at 172nd spot out
of the 186 countries it tested during the one-month time period between
27th of October and 25th of November 2013.
The average internet downloading speeds were 2.29 Mbps during this
period while the uploads stood at just 1.01 Mbps. The median cost per
megabit during this period was $10.92 or PKR 1,200.
Report said that results were obtained by analyzing tests from 1,810,280 unique IPs and 8,365,501 total tests.
Interestingly, the highest average-download speeds in Pakistan were
recorded at a place you probably haven’t heard of, its called Fazal in
Sindh, 2.96 Mbps. (A Wikipedia page of the place doesn’t exist either.)
Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad grabbed the next three positions with average-speeds of 2.40, 2.28 and 2.21 Mbps respectively.
The unknown city tops uploading speeds too, at 2.27 Mbps, almost twice that of 2nd-placed Lahore’s 1.28 Mbps and Karachi’s 1.01.
However, it is also worth noting that Fazal has got just 1521 IP
addresses and the result is based on just 53 tests. The criteria for
data analysis also requires at least a thousand unique IP addresses for a
city to be included.
Report ranked Islamabad atop here with 445,887 IP addresses, followed by Karachi’s 424,762 and Lahore’s 398,898.
Talking of rankings, Hong Kong experiences with the best
average-downloading speeds on planet Earth at 71.22 Mbps, followed by
Singapore and Romania with 52.75 and 50.26 Mbps average-downloading
speeds.
Just to mention, Pakistan was given a Promise Index of 82.5 percent,
just above India which got 81 percent of Promise Index of Internet
Speeds. Promise Index is measured by taking a median ratio of actual
download speed against the promised (or advertised) speeds of ISPs.
This shows that index for Promised internet speed for Pakistan isn’t
that bad. However, the back-haul infrastructure available in Pakistan
isn’t amazing enough to offer higher-speeds. We don’t see this changing
in coming years since the aging copper media of incumbent is apparently
never gonna get replaced cent percent with fiber.
Having said this, let’s wait for 4G, LTE to change this proposition.