When we think of countries with lightning-fast internet speeds, our minds typically drift to the Asian continent where we find internet juggernauts like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. One country that deserves a spot next to these other titans is Romania.
Romania, the small Eastern-European nation which did not have democracy until the early 1990’s, enjoys some of the quickest internet in Europe, and puts larger, more technologically sophisticated nations like the United States, Canada, and England to shame.
So how did Romania become the placeholder for the 6th fastest internet in the world and the fastest internet in Europe, according to Akamai? Romania’s superior internet infrastructure was born out of a phenomenon that is uniquely the country’s own.
The first thing to note is that Romania has a population of around 19 million with a land mass about the size of a middling US state. So compared to larger countries Romania has less citizens online, which makes it easier to deliver high speed internet to more people.
Another major factor lies in Romania’s telecommunications history. When the demand for high-speed internet grew in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the country’s main service provider, Romtelecom, had not yet launched. This forced tech-savvy entrepreneurs to launch their own mini-ISP’s, which gave neighborhood’s of between 50 to 3,000 people their own secular internet connections through use of 100BASE-T UTP LAN’s.
What started as grass-roots organizations quickly became a convenient way to sell inexpensive high-speed internet to urban Romanian areas. Unlike most underground internet networks, Romania’s mini-ISP’s install overhead internet cables – which has reduced the mini-ISP’s overhead costs allowing them to sell at lower prices.
Most of Romania’s internet connections run through cellular broadband cables, cable modems, xDSL, and Ethernet. Currently, fiber-optic cables make up a mere 2.9% of Romania’s internet infrastructure. But regardless, Romania’s neighborhood networks are still able to give 16% of the country internet speeds of at least 100 mega bits per second.
Here is a comprehensive list of the top 10 Romanian VPS providers on the web.
