The Future of the NBN (5): Fast National EU Plans vs Fast Services

In the last post I looked at EU NBN (national) plans for 28 countries. These national plans nicely group into several different target clusters, including:

Compare: Pixabay

• 30mbps coverage by 2020 (Many including Greece, France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Ireland and 12 others )
• 50mbps coverage by 2020 (Germany)
• 100mbps coverage by 2020 (Sweden, Italy 85%, Netherlands 2023)
• 1000mbps coverage by 2025 (Luxembourg 100%, Sweden 98%, Belgium 50%, Netherlands vast majority).

I wanted to compare these clusters against current Speedtest world speed rankings. When they didn't compare neatly, I thought about what other broadband indicator is going to give a better indicator of fast average usage, than a national target. That's when I thought to compare average speed (per Speedtest Global Index) with OECD count of number of very fast users (over 100mbps).

In national targets, Australia sits close to Germany, with 90% of fixed line aiming to get 50mbps, and rest 25mbps.

Let's compare.

NBN target (mbps)	Cntry	Speedtest Ranking	Speed Down	Users/100 over 100mbps(OECD 2018)
30mbps	GR	96	23	0
30mbps	FR	15	108	5
30mbps	ESP	17	107	9
50mbps	AU	60	40	0
50mbps	DE	34	73	6
50-100mbps	CN	24	90	>4
100mbps	IT	46	51	8
1000mbps	LX	16	107	na
1000mbps	SWE	14	110	26
1000mbps	NE	20	99	14

Table 1: Speedtest results (2019) - Ranked by NBN Target
The first table compares NBN targets for country with Speedtest actual speeds. The Speedtest rankings do not line up very well with the NBN targets for each country. France and Spain have low targets but high rankings. Italy and Australia have a quite high national target but quite low Speedtest rankings. NB: China has 4% superfast users - data is only found for gigabit users (post 2).
Now we retry the comparison, sorting by percentage of very fast users (over 100mbps). I include CN (China) data from my post below. OECD data (xls) comes from post below too.

NBN target (mbps)	Cntry	Speedtest Ranking	Speed Down	Users/100 over 100mbps(OECD 2018)
50mbps	AU	60	40	0
30mbps	GR	96	23	0
50-100mbps	CN	24	90	>4
30mbps	FR	15	108	5
50mbps	DE	34	73	6
100mbps	IT	46	51	8
30mbps	ESP	17	107	9
1000mbps	NE	20	99	14
1000mbps	SWE	14	110	26
1000mbps	LX	16	107	na

Table 2: Speeedtest results (2019) - Ranked by Users of 100+mbps (OECD 2018).
Source: Speedtest Global Index - July 2019, EU summary of NBN plans (post 4), OECD (post 1), China (post 2).
The second table compares adoption of over 100mbps speeds (OECD 2018) with Speedtest actual speeds.
This analysis suggests that the Speedtest ranking is more closely related to (1) how many users are on fast (over 100mbps) speeds than (2) what the country's NBN target is. Again Italy stands out as a high performer on number of very fast broadband users, but scores low average Speedtest results. This suggests there are very fast and very slow speeds available across the country leading to a lower average. Australia, Greece and Italy are the only countries not exceeding their national broadband targets (excluding the gigabit targets).
Conclusion: To improve your average speeds, you can either lift everyone's speeds, or push superfast access to a small minority. Small percentage levels of 1000mbps can substantially lift average speeds.