BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- Brunei Darussalam has been ranked 86th in a latest study on global Internet speed among 189 countries surveyed, according to a local media report on Wednesday.
Singapore has the world's fastest download speed of 55.13 megabytes per second (Mbps) while Brunei pales in comparison with only 3.83 Mbps in the survey.
In other words, Internet users in Brunei have to take four hours 27 minutes and 31 seconds to download a 7.5 GigaByte (GB) High Definition (HD) movie, while a similar download takes only 18 minutes and 34 seconds in Singapore.
The findings are based on data collected over 12 months up to May 10 this year by M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University's PlanetLab and other supporting partners.
Brunei stands at No. 15 in the Asia-Pacific region. Its Internet speed lags five Southeast Asian countries - Singapore (No. 1), Thailand (29th place at 16.85 Mbps), Malaysia (63rd at 6.69 Mbps), Vietnam (74th at 5.46 Mbps), and Indonesia (75th at 5.19 Mbps).
According to the survey, war-torn Yemen comes in last at an average speed of just 0.34 Mbps. It will take over two days to download a 7.5 GB HD movie there.
Twenty of the top 30 fastest-performing countries are located in Europe, with seven in Asia, two in North America and one in Oceania.
A total of 139 countries failed to achieve average speeds above 10 Mbps which is a speed deemed by some telecom watchdogs to be the minimum speed required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business.
