Experts are questioning the latest quarterly state of the internet report released by cloud service provider Akamai ranking countries on their internet connection speed.
The report showed in the third quarter of last year, New Zealand's average broadband speed was the 6th fastest in the Asia Pacific region and faster than Australia, with New Zealand ranked 42nd globally compared with Australia, which ranked 44th.
Experts are questioning the process behind the study however - TrueNet's John Butt says the study does not stack up, and that he would put "no store whatsoever" by the results.
"There are a lot of issues with the data, and it doesn't have credibility really," Butt said. "It is a good measure of the speed we see in New Zealand when we use the internet but that's very different from the speed you can get, which is what they are measuring."
Butt said Akamai's results were based on the connection speed from all devices regardless of the type of wifi, device, age of the device or distance from the router - all significant factors when looking at internet speeds.
"A ten-year-old wifi has a maximum speed of about 2mgbs, an eight-year-old wifi has a maximum speed of about 11mgbs and current wifi has max speed of about 450 mgbs, so there's a big difference, and Akamai don't know what sort of wifi is on the other end," Butt said.
"People have different wifis so Akamai is basically measuring the age of the wifi, it has nothing to do with connection speed in New Zealand whatsoever. Also speed drops off very quickly with distance from the router so it's quite flawed."
The report showed New Zealand's average connection speed was around 7 mega bites per second with Australia coming in close at 6.9 mega bites per second, despite having dropped by around 1.8 per cent on the previous quarter.
In the Asia Pacific region New Zealand, Singapore and China, all saw average peak speeds up more than 50 per cent over the previous year, the report found.
The country with the fastest average internet connection speed was South Korea, followed by Hong Kong and Japan.
Despite his concern over the reliability of the study, Butt said New Zealand was tracking well globally, with a study conducted by the company showing investment from 2007 to 2011 in fibre to the node had improved performance in our telephone line broadband which was now significantly better than comparable Australian Networks.
"We're tracking extraordinarily well," Butt said. "There's very few stats worldwide that are comparable but there are some that are starting to be comparable now, and those are from countries including the UK, US, European Union and a few others and we are doing well globally."
Akamai publishes its State of the internet Report each quarter and its latest report covered attack traffic, internet connection speeds and broadband adoption across both fixed and mobile networks, as well as trends seen in the data over time.
