Houses and small businesses in New Zealand cities had an average fixed line broadband download speed of 41Mbps in February this year, with Dunedin leading the way with an average of 196Mbps.
A statement from New Zealand broadband company Chorus said North Shore was second with 54Mbps while Rotorua was third with 52Mbps.
The average download speed in February 2016 was 25Mbps.
“The results show that New Zealanders are downloading, streaming TV and gaming at a huge rate,” said Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers.
{loadposition sam08}“As Chorus crosses the country laying ultra-fast fibre and upgrading the technology in our copper network, more Kiwis can, and are, taking advantage of our faster, more reliable broadband connections.
“Our use of new technology is also driving the increase in speed. It doesn’t matter whether you live in the cities or live rurally, content is flying into our homes faster due to newer technology such as high definition online television and more interactive and complex online games.
“As a nation our average data use is growing fast. Last year we chewed through 1.5 exabytes (or 1,500,000,000 gigabytes) of data. That’s a lot of information, emails, movies, music, and more being bundled and carried all over the country.
Households connected on the Chorus network have nearly doubled in the last 12 months to 21%. More households are taking up Chorus fast VDSL product, with connections increasing to 17%, an increase of 5%.
Overall, according to the content delivery network Akamai, New Zealand's average Internet connection speed was 10.6Mbps in the second quarter of 2016.
Compared to this, Australia’s speed during Q4 2016 was 10.1Mbps, an increase of 4.9% quarter-over-quarter and 24% year-over-year. This put Australia 51st in the world for average connection speeds for the period, down from 50th in the Q3 report.