According to the May 2020 Speedtest Global Index, the self-proclaimed e-state of Estonia has some of the slowest fixed broadband internets in Europe.
Even though Estonia likes to tout its digital solutions and successes, it is not reflected in the global index of fixed broadband speeds, compiled by Speedtest, the website people use to measure their internet speeds.
Estonia is ranked 47th in the world with its average fixed broadband download speed of 65.79 megabits per second. In Europe, Estonia is ranked 24th, on par with countries like Russia (66.01 Mbit/s), Moldova (60.79 Mbit/s), Bulgaria (60.62 Mbit/s) and Belarus (59.56 Mbit/s).
Estonia’s southern neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, have significantly faster average fixed broadband speeds – 105.89 Mbit/s and 108.84 Mbit/s, respectively.
The fastest fixed broadband in Europe is in Romania – 159.31 megabits per second – which also makes Romania fourth in the entire world. The fastest average fixed broadband speed in the world is in Singapore (205.13 Mbit/s), followed by Hong Kong (184.24 Mbit/s) and Thailand (170.14 Mbit/s).
Estonia ranked 22nd in the world in mobile internet speeds
Even not so digitally advanced countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Spain have faster average fixed broadband speeds than Estonia. Broadband speeds are higher than in Estonia in even such remote places like New Zealand. And Estonia’s 65.79 Mbit/s average is lower than the global average of 76.94 Mbit/s.
Some better news, according to the Speedtest Global Index, comes in the area of mobile internet where Estonia is ranked 22nd in the world and 11th in Europe with the average speed of 49.57 Mbit/s. However, the mobile internet index only lists 138 countries while the fixed broadband index is compiled of 173 countries.
However, if we compare Estonia’s mobile internet speed with the ones in the top of the index, things don’t look so rosy – South Korea, ranked first, has the average mobile internet speed of 100.92 Mbit/s, the United Arab Emirates 99.67 Mbit/s and China 99.10 Mbit/s. The global average speed of mobile internet is 33.71 Mbit/s, according to Speedtest.
The Speedtest Global Index compares internet speed data from around the world on a monthly basis. Data for the Index comes from the hundreds of millions of tests taken by real people using Speedtest every month. Countries must have at least 300 unique user results for mobile or fixed broadband to be ranked in either category.
Cover: A sign in an Estonian village points at the internet at the beginning of the millennium; Estonia was an early adopter of internet, but according to the Speedtest Global Index, now lags behind in terms of the speed.
Estonia has slow internet mainly because it ironically had really good landline phone network historically (especially compared with other parts of USSR and Eastern-Europe), so most older buildings still have copper wire connection what dates back for several decades but still is widely in use to provide ADSL based connections. Fiber cable projects are under construction in many places but it still takes quite some time. Also ISP-s in Estonia are not know by good price/performance ratio.