ICT specialists have voiced a need to have an ISP speed index for the continent’s operators, with such a move seen as beneficial for market competitiveness.
Such an initiative would be timely in Africa despite the low internet usage, especially in content sharing.
According to some respondents interviewed by HumanIPO, such a move would lead to more competitive pricing with low speed packages becoming cheaper.
“Such a survey in Africa would mainly be centered on mobile internet bundles and cost per megabyte, both on mobile devices and modems. Any credible survey would prompt competitive pricing by providers,” says James Mbugua, a web editor at BBC Africa.
“It affects how they provision by limiting how much maximum speed a customers can reach if they are on unlimited. They also make low speed packages very cheap and higher speed packages very expensive to limit their customers to the low speed packages,” said Steve Odundo, an IT consultant.
A recent survey index by Netflix will help its 33 million frequent customers, who stream in excess of a billion hours monthly, choose the best ISPs for those living in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Mexico.
The US has a speed of 3.35Mbps on Google fibre and 1.25Mbps on Clearwire, while Finland has the overall top speed at 2.57Mbps ahead of the UK at 2.37Mbps.
