In the broadband world, faster is always better. Once you experience fast broadband speeds, anything less than what you are enjoying feels rather unpleasant.
In mobile broadband, 4G speeds are faster than 3G speeds. When Safaricom set the way by introducing 4G into the Kenyan market almost 3 years ago, it ushered a new era where we were treated to faster speeds which makes the experience way more enjoyable.
Currently, we have 2 telcos that offer 4G services to its consumers: Safaricom and Telkom. Others like JTL are testing the service while we are yet to see Airtel roll out 4G yet.
Ookla (the company known for its Speedtest tool) released a report where they revealed statistics about the broadband speeds in Kenya among the various telcos in Kenya.
They used data from the tests done on the Speedtest apps on iOS and Android apps on LTE capable devices from the major carriers in Kenya.
Safaricom has the fastest mobile speeds
Ookla found out that that Safaricom provided faster average speeds to their users than other providers with an average download speeds of 21.25 Mbps and average upload speeds of 9.67 Mbps on LTE devices.
City Network Speeds
The surprising revelation from this report is that users in Mombasa and Nakuru have faster average download speeds on Safaricom and Orange. However, this is not the case for Airtel as users in Nairobi generally experience faster speeds than users in both Mombasa and Nakuru.
Mobile tests taken
This gives an overall outlook on the broadband speeds experienced by users on Safaricom, Orange and Airtel. Safaricom has the highest average download and upload speeds. Airtel has the lowest average download and upload speeds (10.08 Mbps/2.84Mbps) and also have the highest latency (50). Telkom is right at the middle
From the report, they also found out that the average download speeds in Kenya was 15.87 Mbps and the average upload speeds were 6.88 Mbps. The Q2-Q3 speeds realized were slightly faster than what Ookla reported last time. I still wonder why Australia says we have slow Internet in Kenya.
