Southeast Asia Playing Catch-up on Internet Speed: Google

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As Southeast Asia becomes increasingly wired, smartphone-filled and social-media obsessed, a Google study shows internet speeds still lag behind.

In a post on the Google Analytics blog earlier this month measuring web speeds around the world, Indonesia – the third largest Facebook market in the world – ranks as one of the lowest for web page loading speeding at an average of 20.8 seconds. This is more than six times slower than South Korea, where a website takes 3.4 seconds to load, one of the world’s fastest, and China where a website takes 6.8 second to load.

Thailand and Malaysia fared slightly – but not significantly – better, with a page taking 9.6 and 14.3 seconds to load through a computer browser respectively.

But as mobile Internet grows dramatically in the Southeast Asian region, the pace of mobile Internet cannot keep up, with an experience “about 1.5x slower than [the] desktop experience,” according to Google’s statistics. This is especially pertinent for users in countries like Indonesia, where a young population is accessing the Internet for the first time through their Blackberries or iPhones rather than their desktops and usage of mobile social networking sites like Twitter are among the highest in the world.

“That’s a very big difference, and that is even taking into account that many popular sites are already optimizing for the mobile visitor,” said the report from Google Analytics.

Almost all of Southeast Asia’s biggest economies ranked on the bottom of the scale comparing mobile internet speeds – including Indonesia and Singapore at 12.9 seconds, Malaysia at 12.7 and Thailand at 17.4.

Even in wealthy Singapore where technology infrastructure is ahead of its neighbors, many users still complain of slow Internet connections when accessing websites through their phones. Unlike India, one of the first markets in Asia to be 4G-enabled, Singapore will only be 4G-ready in 2016.

Still, this has not stopped users from snapping up latest smartphone models. The growth of Southeast Asia’s smartphone market has been staggering – with nearly 7.7 million units of phones bought in the first three months of this year in the region’s key markets of Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia,the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, according to market research company GfK Asia. Spikes in demand ranged anywhere from 40 percent over 400 percent over the same period last year in different markets across the region.

Indonesia – the region’s largest smartphone market – chalked up sales exceeding US1.4 billion  in smartphones last year, according to GfK Asia, and markets like Singapore and Malaysia have a smartphone penetration rate of 88% , translating into nine out of ten of the overall population.