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The Countries With the Fastest Internet Are All in Asia

If you’ve ever used the internet in Japan or Taiwan, you know the pain of coming back to the US and having to endure our much slower “high-speed” internet.

Actually, the average internet speed of a society seems like a much better proxy for quality of life than more abstract things like per capita GDP, since GDP figures are fake, and internet speeds are real.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

11 Responses to “The Countries With the Fastest Internet Are All in Asia”

  1. February 1

    David Iach

    I’m from Romania (place 6 this time, although we were place 3 some months ago) and the internet speed here is awesome. You can get a 1000 Mbps connection for about $18/month.

  3. February 1

    Jeff Alstott

    What place(s) have the best internet and the lowest costs of living?

  4. February 1

    Louie Helm

    Taiwan

  5. February 1

    Louie Helm

    Japan and Singapore are faster, but much more expensive.

  6. February 1

    Jeff Alstott

    Not a thing I knew about Taiwan! http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp

  7. February 1

    Louie Helm

    Romania is probably the other bargain in the top 10. Haven’t been there personally but wouldn’t be surprised if someplace like that or Estonia is just awesome without anyone noticing for awhile.

  8. February 1

    Jeff Alstott

    Now the real question is what are the visa situations…

  9. February 1

    Louie Helm

    Taiwan and Japan both have visa on arrival if you just want to visit them for a few months at a time.

  10. February 1

    Derrick Lin

    hmm maybe i should go hang in taipei for a few months

  11. February 1

    Steven Grimm

    I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Taiwan and can say that the Internet quality there is highly variable. This study says it measured the “average peak” speed, whatever that means, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the typical speed.

    The major ISPs in Taiwan frequently have bad congestion both domestically and, especially, on their overseas links, and your fast fiber-optic Internet connection often slows to a crawl at random times of day. My in-laws are in the middle of Taipei and pay for what should be fast connectivity. Sometimes it is indeed quite fast. Other times it can’t even handle a Skype call or a YouTube video. The variability is much higher than what I see in the USA and I’m not sure the mean transfer speed is all that much better, even if the maximum speed looks great on paper.