International Internet Bandwith

Today's map displays international internet bandwidth globally. "International bandwidth" is another way of referring to the contracted capacity of international connections between countries for transmitting Internet traffic. These data are kindly made available from the World Bank's new open data initiative.

Like most other geographies of Internet-related data, the patterns in this map are highly uneven. Countries in northern Europe generally have the most available kilobits per person. The Netherlands has 78kb per person, Sweden 50kb, and the UK 40kb. A number of micro-states and small nations also score highly on this measure: Hong Kong (not displayed on the map) has 315kb per person, Singapore has 23kb, Antigua and Barbuda has 17kb and Panama has 16kb. Surprisingly, the United States has fewer available kilobits per person than any of these countries (11kb).

At the other end of the scale, there is a long-tail of countries in Africa, Asia and South America that have less than 1kb per person. Guinea, for instance, has only 0.21 bits (0.00021kb) per person (our next post will focus specifically on bandwidth in Africa).

These data seem to mirror the geographies of content at the global scale, a topic we plan on exploring in much more detail in a future paper.