Romania went up 13 places in an annual top of broadband internet speeds, ranking fifth in the world. Only Singapore, Sweden, Denmark and Norway have a faster internet than Romania.

The report, published by Cable.co.uk, is based on more than 163 million speed tests in 200 countries. The data was collected between June 2017 and May 2018 by M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research and Princeton University's PlanetLab.

Romania ranked 18th in last year’s top, with a mean download speed of 21.33 Mbps. This year, the average download speed in Romania went up to 38.60 Mpbs, which means that it takes just under 18 minutes to download a typical 5GB HD movie.

In Singapore, which tops the ranking this year, the mean download speed is of 60.39 Mbps, which means that it takes around 11 minutes to download a typical 5G HD movie. On the other hand, the average speed in Yemen, which is at the bottom of the ranking, is of 0.31 Mbps. This means that downloading a movie here takes almost 37 hours.

When it comes to Romania’s neighbors, Bulgaria ranks 31st with an average speed of 20.2 Mbps, Hungary ranks ninth with a mean download speed of 34.01 Mbps, and Moldova ranks 45th with a speed of 13.88 Mbps.

Besides Singapore, all the other places in top ten are from Europe. Belgium ranks sixth with an average download speed of 36.71 Mbps, Netherlands – seventh, with a speed of 35.95 Mbps, Luxembourg – eighth, 35.14 Mbps, Hungary – ninth, 34.01 Mbps, and Jersey – tenth, 30.90 Mbps.

Elsewhere in the world, Japan ranks 12th with an average download speed of 28.94 Mbps, the U.S. ranks 20th with a speed of 25.86 Mbps, UK is at number 35 with a speed of 18.57 Mbps, and the United Arab Emirates rank 97th with an average speed of 4.35 Mbps.

Fixed internet speed in Romania, up by 18% in 2017

Irina Marica, irina.marica@romania-insider.com

(photo source: Pixabay.com)