A report published earlier this week by the European Commission on the performance of fixed broadband across Member States and other European countries has indicated that the performance of broadband services in Malta has improved when compared to last year’s performance and is today better than the EU average in a number of key performance indicators.
When comparing the average speed performance against the advertised speed, the score obtained by the Maltese ISPs is above the EU average. This comparison for upload speeds, at times, exceeds the 100% mark. This means that local ISPs are performing better than the average EU member state in terms of fulfilling their promised speeds in their adverts. Furthermore, there are instances in which the actual speed obtained by the subscriber, is higher than the advertised speed.
Packet loss and latency are two other indicators reported in the study. While speed indicates how fast data travels in the network, packet loss is an indication of how much of that data is lost over the network. Therefore, networks sporting high speeds with low packet losses indicate high performance. On the other hand, latency is a measure of delay in communication, which amongst others, is a function of the distance between the two network points in communication. The three indicators combined, that is speed, packet loss and latency, are important factors to consider for applications requiring high speed and real time response such as high quality video services and applications related to financial services.
With regard to packet loss, Malta registered an exceptionally low figure when compared to other countries. This is a clear indication that local service providers are offering services over highly robust and efficient networks.
Despite these positive indicators, the report also found that broadband services in Malta are subject to more latency than those in other Member States. The MCA considers that this finding is likely to have been significantly influenced by the location of the server against which latency was measured. In this case, the closest server to Malta was located in Italy as opposed to a number of the other countries which had such a server located on home grounds.
In terms of broadband penetration (as a % of population), Malta has made very significant progress and now ranks 5th in the EU, surpassed only by Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark in this regard. Malta’s penetration stood at 34% as at July 2013, whereas Denmark, the best performing Member State had a penetration of 40%.
Malta however fared worse than the EU average with respect to the take-up of connections of at least 30 Mbps. The take-up in Malta stood at 12% whilst that of the EU was 18%. In the best performing country in this regard – Belgium, 61% of subscribers enjoyed a connection speed of 30 Mbps or more. Service providers have recently upgraded their broadband offers and therefore, this indicator will certainly continue to improve.