MANILA, Philippines – The average internet speed in the Philippines is slightly down from 4.3 Mbps in the 2nd quarter to 4.2 Mbps in the recently released “State of the Internet” Q3 2016 report by Akamai.

With the average speed at a relative standstill, the country remains to have one of the slowest rates among its peers in the Asia Pacific region. Only India is slower among the 15 countries surveyed at 4.1 Mbps – a 14% increase quarter over quarter (QOQ).

If the trend continues, the Philippines could steal the bottommost spot from India.

The Philippines exhibited weak showings in other categories as well. QOQ, average peak connection speed declined from 32.9 Mbps to 32.8 Mbps, and the percentage of existing connections above 4 Mbps dropped from 33% to 29%.

The decline in the adoption of connections above 4 Mbps is the biggest in the region, representing a -13% QOQ change. From Q1 to Q2, the country had experienced a 79% growth for the same metric. 

Higher-tier broadband adoption experienced some growth. The percentage of connections above 10 Mbps grew from 5% to 5.4% while connections above 15 Mbps grew from 2.1% to 2.4%. 

The greatest improvement the Philippines has shown is in mobile connection speed, growing from 8.5 Mbps to 13.9 Mbps. While the number is the fastest in the Asia Pacific, the achievement comes with an asterisk: the country is the only one in the region to not have made Akamai’s minimum sample size requirement of 25,000 IPv4 mobile connections measured. While the number is certainly promising, it will be unfair to claim that the Philippines has the fastest mobile data speed in the region until it has reached the set requirement.

Read the full report here. 

Akamai is a US-based content delivery network that has 216,000 servers deployed globally from which it gathers data used for its quarterly reports. – Rappler.com