Ireland slides down table in quality of public Wi-Fi (infographic)

2 Dec 2015

If you’re a regular Irish public Wi-Fi user in 2015, then you might be finding slower speeds compared with 2014, as the latest findings shows Ireland has dropped from fourth to eight in the world rankings.

Each year, the mobile internet and Wi-Fi watchdog Rotten Wi-Fi publishes its annual report highlighting the countries that, on average, have the highest speeds when connected to public Wi-Fi.

It’s certainly no small survey either, with the group taking into consideration the speed and quality of public hotspots across 184 countries and, it seems, the Baltic states are where it’s at when it comes to Wi-Fi on-the-go.

Just like last year, the world’s best place to access public Wi-Fi is Lithuania, which has increased its average download speed from 15.4Mbps in 2014, to 16.1Mbps in 2015.

This is closely followed by its neighbour Estonia, often well-praised for its attitudes towards developing a strong broadband network, which has an average download speed of 14.8Mbps in 2015, compared with 14Mbps last year.

But it’s quite hard to ignore that Ireland has fallen significantly in the rankings, not due to a decline in the service available, but rather that as a nation we have failed to improve by much of note.

This year, Ireland has managed to maintain an average download speed of 11.5Mbps, compared with 11.43Mbps in 2014.

Saying that, it could be worse. In 2014, Croatia was ranked second in the world with an average download speed of 14.05Mbps, but this year it has plummeted to 17th with an average speed of 9.7Mbps.

Meanwhile, the city-state of Singapore has risen to third place this year with 13.1Mbps, compared with 9.5Mbps last year.

Public Wi-Fi image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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