Global Broadband Quality Study 2009 by Saïd Business School (of Oxford University) & University of Oviedo

Sponsored by Cisco and conducted by a team of MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and also the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics, the 2nd annual global study on the quality of broadband connections has just been released on 30 September 2009.

The 1st groundbreaking Broadband Quality Study was published in September 2008 to highlight each country’s ability to benefit from next-generation web applications and services.

It was found that broadband quality is linked to a nation’s advancement as a knowledge economy and countries with broadband on their national agenda had the highest broadband quality. This year’s report covers an additional 24 countries to 66 and includes new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities.

The study was based on approximately 24 million records sourced from actual broadband speed tests from Speedtest.net (Ookla) for the target 66 countries during May 2008 and May to July 2009.

The research team concluded that broadband experience is mainly affected by broadband speeds in both directions, latency, network over-subscription, and packet loss. These parameters were grouped into 3 major categories: download and upload throughput, and latency.

The Broadband Quality Score (BQS) for each country was determined using a formula that weighted each category according to the quality requirements of a set of popular applications now and in the future as follow:

It is found that:

Overall average broadband quality increased across the globe, with global average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Mbps, while global average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps. The global average latency has decreased by 21% to 170 ms.

South Korea tops the 2009 Broadband Leadership table. Driven by continuous efforts by the government to strengthen the country’s position as one of the world’s ICT leaders, and combined with higher broadband penetration, South Korea rises above Japan (in the 2nd place now) in the global Broadband Leadership rankings.

The  Global Top 10 Broadband Leaders are:

• 1. South Korea
• 2. Japan
• 3. Hong Kong
• 4. Sweden
• 5. Switzerland
• 6. Netherlands
• 7. Singapore
• 8. Luxembourg
• 9. Denmark
• 10. Norway

Malaysia ranked 48 and China ranked 49 in this broadband leadership matrix. The United States ranked 15.

Click here to download the report of Global Broadband Quality Study 2009 sponsored by Cisco.