Where you want to be playing live dealer games from in 2015

After recently finding out that the good folk of Finland enjoy lightning fast and free internet at Helsinki airport , it got me thinking that the last time we took  a look at global internet speeds was in 2010.

Average connection speeds have changed considerably since then in most countries.

Akamai seem to be the go to guys now when it comes to stats on global connection speeds. Their  State of the Internet Reports is referenced as gospel by the media when it is released each quarter.

Below are findings from their Q1 2015 report on average internet connectivity speeds by country. If you live somewhere listed on the top of these charts, then you’ll probably never know what it’s like play with a deal lag, or have your dealer momentarily freeze mid sentence.

The global top 10

Rounded out by Finland (not just the airport that’s quick!), and including a small country by the name of Latvia (good place to base a live dealer studio) these are the best connected countries on the planet right now.

Where’s the USA?

The US comes in at 19th, just ahead of Canada. Both pretty good for countries of their size. Note that no very large countries (by land area) make it into the top 10.

Some US states are fast

Delaware leads the charge here…as they did with their push for regulated intrastate online gambling.

None of the larger states (by land area) make this list…Texas, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado. Even California, home to Silicon Valley doesn’t crack the top 10. Again, probably because of its size.

Europe’s generally very good. Africa and the Middle East…not so

Europe is well represented in the global top 10, and almost entirely within the global top 50 (Italy woops, and I think they forgot about Greece).

Africa’s champion of connectivity, South Africa, just scrapes into the global top 100.

Asia Pac very solid

Very high population density probably helps a little here (although not doing Australia or New Zealand any favours).

Map representation

The below connection speed map is sourced from Speedtest.net and based on 30 days worth of user test data.

It offers a really nice graphical representation of where things are humming and where they’re crawling. The darker the colour, the faster the connection.

It looks reasonably consistent with the Akamai findings (looking at Japan, Korea, Scandinavia) although they do find the US performing better.

Finally, the slowest of the slow

If you live in one of these countries, you’re still waiting for this page to load. According to Forbes (reported in November 2013, but unlikely things have changed since then) the worst connected countries in the world are:

• Laos at 0.96 Mbps
• Iran at 0.63 Mbps (plus extensive social media restrictions)
• Libya 0.5 Mbps
• Cuba 0.21 Mbps
• Eritrea 0.2 Mbps