The most recent State of the Internet report by Akamai lists the Philippines (global rank 105) and India (global rank 115) at the bottom in terms of average connection speed for fixed broadband (fixed BB). The average speed (2.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively) isn’t the real issue. The quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) change that is pretty much non existent and the year-over-year (YoY) change that averages at 30% for both are bigger issues, in my opinion; specially in contrast with Indonesia that has a 49% QoQ change and a 149% YoY change. These are also the 2 economies that have a less than 10% broadband adoption rate, among those surveyed (significant disconnect with ITU numbers for India’s Fixed Broadband Subscriptions per 100, but still under 10%).
In the mobile broadband (mobile BB) indicators Philippines and Indonesia was dropped off the list in the report, so hard to compare. Of the developing APAC economies Sri Lanka was on top with Thailand (2.6 Mbps and 2.8 Mbps average speeds). The average page load times however were pretty high: 4636 ms for fixed BB and 4263 ms for mobile BB in Sri Lanka; 3541 ms for fixed BB and 3382 ms for mobile BB in Thailand; 4840 ms for fixed BB and 6772 ms for mobile broadband in India. Page load time is not equal to RTT or Latency. However, it does have a correlation.
the latency graph tells an entirely different story. For every 20ms improvement in latency, we have a linear improvement in page loading times. There are many good reasons for this: an average page is composed of many small resources, which require many connections, and TCP performance of each is closely tied to RTT.
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