Panama's Onda Cable telecommunications company has the second fastest online Internet service in Latin America and the Caribbean, after Chile's Movistar, it was reported here.
The Speedtest Awards of the US company Ookla, granted the award after evaluating 727,596 measurements during six months in which it determined an average speed of 55.21 Megabits per second (Mbps), with maximums of 80.27 Mbps in the download and 10.7 Mbps in the upload.
These results together with the analysis of the other provider of similar services, Cable and Wireless, placed Panama in the 38th place out of 174 countries evaluated last June, two places below the previous measurement in fixed networks, because in mobile it sank to the 108th place, also behind Chile.
A statement from Onda Cable company reported that in the country, after the national emergency caused by Covid-19, Internet consumption in homes shot up by 50 percent and continues to rise due to the increase in teleworking, virtual classes and e-commerce.
The National Public Services Authority (ASEP) will extend for two more months the spectrum assigned to the four mobile phone operators in Panama and to Personal Communication Services free of charge to guarantee service to users, announced Armando Fuentes, administrator of the government entity.
Ookla is a company dedicated to mobile and broadband network intelligence, testing applications and technology, which offers free of charge the possibility for users to make a speed test to their network and device.
According to its June report, Speedtest ranked the five fastest mobile networks in the Americas in Canada (fifth in the world), the United States (34), Jamaica (46), Trinidad and Tobago (47) and Cuba (62); on the cable internet the best results were for the United States (14), Canada (19), Chile (27), Panama (38) and Barbados (42).