Measuring what's easy to measure, not what's significant
This survey is the equivalent of estimating a country’s road traffic journey times by using the average top speed of the vehicles sold there each year.
First error: by using speedtest data, they’re basically just measuring the speed between the user premises and the next hop in the network. That doesn’t tell you about backhaul provision (hi Cable ISPs!) or consistency of service (ibid.). Use an “off-brand” speedtest website and you can see your reported download figures tumble.
The other problem is that measuring speedtests is confounded by pricing structures of the providers more than the actual network capabilities. If providers in Country A give a 20 Mbit service for €15/mo, an 80 Mbit service for €20/mo, and a 200Mbit/sec for €35/mo, people like me will take the cheapest one that exceeds my peak bandwidth requirement (which, incidentally, never rises over 20Mbit/sec). Lots of users living on their own, who want Internet for occasional use will also go for the services with low bandwidth caps on cost grounds. But in another country, where operators only offer the 200 Mbit/sec option for €35/mo in an effort to maximise revenue, that country’s network to be considered faster, even though both are the same capacity.
The only legitimate way of determining this survey's results would have been the hard way: discover the share of domestic connections by carrier type (DOCSYS, xDSL, FTTP, UMTS), and then apply an empircially-derived performance figure per technology (and generation) to those connection counts (thus, a 1 Gbit cable connection scores far, far less than a 1 Gbit FTTP), and look at the amount of trunk network capacity in the country.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
