Slowly does it...

One of my major bug-bears must be the speed of the Internet in Madagascar. I recently came across a few bloggers complaining about how slow the Internet was in their respective countries but I'm sure nothing can top ours, or should that be, "beat ours into last place."

Officially Madagascar has the 19th slowest download speed, and 24th slowest upload speed in the world on speedtest.net, but I beg to differ. I've tested it at different times of the day and week over the last two months, and consistently get results putting us right at the bottom of the list, apart maybe for Lebanon.

Just to put this into perspective: South Korea gets download speeds of of 39.6Mb/s, Canada and the US are around 10Mb/s on average, and a wee island group called the Alands, sandwiched between Sweden and Finland, achieves speeds of 26Mb/s. All of this is compared to my trundling 0.55Mb/s. Even the official rate of 0.99Mb/s cannot exactly be described as brisk.

The ISPs explain it away as a result of "perturbations" caused by the recent Cyclone Bengiza that graced our shores. I remain perturbed by its ponderous, lackadaisical, sluggish, slothful pace - especially frustrating for a blogger who loves to upload photographs and someone doing a website-building project with one of his classes...

Sluggish Internet at its worst... (Real speeds in boxes to right of "official" speeds)