Despite all the frequently heard hype regarding Malta's broadband improvement, a report published yesterday classes Malta in the category ‘below today's applications threshold’.
This is three categories down from the top. The first category is ‘Ready for tomorrow’, the second 'Comfortably enjoying today's applications' and the third is 'Meeting the needs of today's applications'.
Then comes ‘Below today's applications threshold, in which Malta is the highest-placed country.
The study, published in the Digital Business supplement of The Financial Times, was conducted by Oxford University's Said Business School and Spain's Universidad de Oviedo, and was sponsored by Cisco, the communications manufacturer.
South Korea, Sweden, Bulgaria and the Netherlands all share a common attribute, the report says.
These countries are all described as 'ready for tomorrow', placing them in the vanguard of countries prepared to take advantage of high-speed digital connections and the applications that run on them.
Other countries in this first category are Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Denmark and Romania.
The second set are said to be 'comfortably enjoying today's applications' and include Switzerland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Finland, the US, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Hungary, Germany, Slovenia, Belgium, Taiwan, Austria, and Hong Kong.
The third set is described as 'meeting the needs of today's applications' and includes Estonia, Iceland, Singapore, Greece, Canada, the UK, Australia, Spain, Poland, New Zealand, Turkey, Ireland, Italy and the Ukraine.
The fourth set, described as 'below today's applications threshold' includes, apart from Malta, Chile, Luxembourg, China, Qatar, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Cyprus, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tunisia, Malaysia, UAE, the Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan, Colombia, Morocco, South Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia.
The report states that in this fourth category “businesses and citizens are unable even to take full advantage of current web-based opportunities.”
Quality is different from download speed. As bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, become pervasive, the broadband gap is increasingly being redefined as a quality divide.
High quality today was described as a download speed of 3.75 megabits per second, upload speed of 1mbps and latency (delay in response) as 95 milliseconds.
But by next year, the demands of visual networking, large file sharing and high-definition video streaming will raise the bar to 11.25mbps for downloads, 5mbps for uploads and 60 milliseconds latency.