The ranking has been drawn up by Cable on the basis of the average download speed in 224 countries: Italy is improving, but not as much as you would expect
As every year, Cable has sorted the countries of the world into a ranking in which the one with the highest average Internet connection speed dominates.
It sounds simple, but it isn't: to arrive at the ranking, more than a billion speed tests were taken into account, carried out in 224 countries.
A "folly", some would say, which is nonetheless more than useful for getting a rough indication of the state of the infrastructure in a given country or region of the world. Cable excluded those nations where it was not possible to obtain more than 100 tests in the time period analyzed, i.e., in the 12 months leading up to June 30, 2021, arriving at results for 224 countries. These show that the global average speed continues to grow: 7.4 Mbps in 2017, 9.1 Mbps in 2018, 11 Mbps in 2019 and 24.8 Mbps in 2020, while this year the value has gone up by around 20% to just under 30 Mbps.
Italy out of the top 50
Italy occupies position number 61 of Cable's 2021 ranking on internet speed, the third last country in Western Europe: before us Guernsey, a British island with 65 thousand inhabitants, in 71st place with 31 Mbps, and the Faroe Islands, a Danish archipelago with not even 50 thousand inhabitants, in 83rd place with 22 Mbps.
A pity, especially because in previous years we were higher: 47th in 2019, 43rd in 2018 and 46th in 2017, while in 2020 we plummeted several positions further back, stopping, precisely, on the box number 68.
It's not all to throw away because if you go to see the average download speed the improvement there was, despite the several steps back in 2020 in terms of position in the rankings that still affect us. Cable found an average download speed of 36.69 Mbps, a figure that over the years has always gone up especially this year compared to the previous year.
There was in fact a leap of over 10 Mbps: 23.18 Mbps in 2020, compared to fairly smaller increases in past years (they were 17.3 Mbps in 2019, 15.1 Mbps in 2018 and 10.7 Mbps in 2017). Between 2020 and 2021, according to the data in Cable's possession, so the situation has improved markedly, but it remains a ranking that could and perhaps should have been better, if we look at the position occupied by other European countries.
The comparison with others
For example, Switzerland, 45th with 50 Mbps, Germany, 36th with 61 Mbps, or Portugal, 34th with 63 Mbps. Not to mention the French cousins, 19th with 86 Mbps, or the Spanish, 16th with almost 90 Mbps. In short, the Italian Internet has improved: 13 Mbps of average speed gained in a single year are not few, especially if you think that in the previous comparison we had gone up just 5 Mbps.
But it's not enough, because if we grow evidently the others grow faster. A partial confirmation of this is the fact that the global top 10 of the 2021 ranking on internet speed according to Cable is occupied by 8 European countries, with the extraordinary performance of Iceland, third "absolute" with 192 Mbps, Liechtenstein, second with 211 Mbps, and Jersey, first with 274 Mbps.