A ethnic woman surfs the internet (Source: VNA)Vietnam has the slowest mobile data speed in the Southeast Asia (SEA) and Oceania region, a report by communications technology and services provider Ericsson said.
The Ericsson Mobility Report was made by Ericsson based on Ookla's NetMetrics data from Speedtest.net 2015.
Data from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as the Philippines, Australia, Bangladesh and Myanmar, besides Vietnam were analysed.
Singapore has the fastest mobile data speed of 21,870 kilobyte per second (Kbps) in the Southeast Asia (SEA) and Oceania region, twice as fast as that of Australia at 11,190 Kbps, which ranks second, and nine times that of Thailand, which ranks third with 2,380 Kbps.
Meanwhile, Vietnam's mobile data speed is the slowest at 160 Kbps, only one-fourth of Myanmar's data speed of 620 Kbps, which ranked second from bottom.
In network performance too, Vietnam comes last in app coverage based on cell-edge downlink throughput.
Accordingly, Vietnam's mobile data speed is just sufficient for applications such as voice messages, which require only 12.5 Kbps.
However, users may experience lag when using applications such as music streaming that need a minimum speed of 160 Kbps.
The country's mobile data speed is not enough for consumers to use data-intensive applications such as video telephony (600 Kbps), video streaming (720 Kbps) and 720 P HD video streaming (2,000 Kbps).
However, the country was among the top 10 countries that saw the fastest mobile subscription growth in the first quarter of this year.
The country recorded two million new mobile subscriptions in the first quarter, equal to that of Bangladesh.
Myanmar had the most impressive mobile subscription growth in the region, at five million new subscriptions during the period.
New mobile subscriptions also hit four million in Indonesia.
The report also shows that 25 percent of the handsets are smartphones in South East Asia.
It is expected that there will be almost 800 million smartphone subscriptions in South East Asia and Oceania by 2020, the report said.-VNA
