Teens access the internet in a central highlands province of Kon Tum
The Q3 2012 report on the Internet speed of Akamai, a US network providing Internet content, showed that the average Internet speed in Vietnam was 1.3Mbps. This placed the country 49th out of 54 surveyed countries, far below the world average of 2.8 Mbps.After surveying 4.7 million IP addresses from Vietnam. Akamai found that 5.07 per cent of them had Internet connection speeds lower than 256 Kbps, while 1.17 per cent had Internet connections over 4 Mbps and only 0.03 per cent had connections over 10 Mbps.
When compared with 12 regional countries surveyed, Vietnam ranked above only India (1.0 Mbps) and Indonesia (1.2 Mbps).
Meanwhile, according to NetIndex, which shows statistics based on the measurement by Speedtest.net, the download speed in Vietnam from January 26, 2013 to February 24, 2013 was 9.90 Mbps. This placed the country 55th out of 180 nations. The upload speed was 7.38 Mbps, meaning Vietnam was 27th among 180 countries.
According to VNNIC, in November 2012, the average speed for every 31.3 million Internet service users increased by 0.002 Mbps in comparison with 2011.
However, some analysts say the figure is unreliable because only ISPs have exact data on their subscribers.
Meanwhile, representatives of ISPs affirmed that in 2012, they increased international bandwidth to better satisfy the requirements of users.
The Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT), for example, now offers 160 Gbps international bandwidth, which is expected to increase to 270 Gbps by 2015 and 500 Gbps by 2020.
FPT Telecom upgraded its committed international bandwidth for all FTTH service packages last year to minimum Internet access speeds between 1,152 Kbps and 3.072 Kbps. CMC Telecom also doubled international bandwidth since December 2012.
An Internet expert noted that basic services such as news and music have been provided by Vietnamese companies, so the demand for international access has decreased significantly.
Explaining the results reported by Akamai, the expert said that the problem may lie in the measurement method. Under the method the company used, when the number of new Internet subscribers increased, the average speed would decrease.
"In Vietnam, since new subscribers increase rapidly, but they rarely have international access, the average bandwidth measured by Akamai has been decreasing," he said.
