Tuesday 30 September 2014

Belize lagging is behind in Internet Bandwith

On Friday September 26th BTL held its annual general meeting at the Biltmore Best western in Belize City.  The income that the company received of 136 million dollars was on par with last year, but its profits refers were down by 2 million dollars from 21 million to 19.5. Another report on regional bandwidth has been released and it shows Belize lagging at the very bottom of the bandwidth chain.

An internet publication called ICT Pulse has performed what it calls "an update of actual Internet download speeds in 27 Caribbean countries and a comparison with results in May of 2014.

" Using a recognized broadband testing outfit called OOKLA. They compare and rank consumer upload and download speeds worldwide and represents them as a rolling average in Megabits per second over a 30 day period.

For the Caribbean, they found that the slowest average download speeds were recorded in Cuba, at 1.65 Megs, which ranked 185th worldwide, a little above that was Guyana, with 2.30 megs which was 181st worldwide, and then Belize, at 2.64 megs, 174th out of 192 countries in the world.
The fastest download speed in the region was recorded in CuraƧao, at 15.94 Megs, followed by the Bahamas at 14.04 megs. The survey also found that the average download speed in Belize decreased slightly in the past four months.

 A response to one of the BTL's representative said that the company is making incremental improvements and the "doubling of speeds in October, quote, "should shift this position considerably."


The new schedule for the new rates will show that the new minimum speed will now be 256K, which will cost 25 dollars monthly for the use, For those using the 128k will be the same price which is now being phased out. Costumer's that used to pay $56 for 256k will now get 512 k for that price. And so it goes right down the list in doubling speeds for the same price, And their will be adding a new speed for the deep pockets for 16 megs and will cost an average of seven hundred dollars a month.