How we created a dashboard on internet speed in Europe
What’s the average internet speed in Europe? Our new dashboard shows the extent of the digital divide between, and within, European countries – here’s how it was made and what's the key R code behind it.
The dashboard on the average internet speed in Europe created by OBC Transeuropa for EDJNet is based on data provided by Speedtest by Ookla Global Fixed and Mobile Network Performance Maps, based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence data for the first quarter of 2022.
The data consists in a gridded spatial data frame. Every tile of the grid contains several internet speed measurements, voluntarily sent by users through the Speedtest platform.
Joining tiles with European administrative units
In order to get a sense of the state of internet speed across Europe, I joined Ookla data with the shapefiles of Europe’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), and Local Administrative Units (LAU).
The values of download speed, upload speed, and latency for each administrative unit were obtained by calculating the average of all the observations within the administrative unit’s boundaries, weighted by the number of tests. Average download and upload speed values are expressed in megabit per second (Mbps), not to be mistaken with megabyte per second (MBps). Average latency values are expressed in milliseconds (ms).
Matching municipalities (LAU) with regions (NUTS 2)
To match European municipalities with higher administrative units I relied on the systematization of Eurostat correspondence tables made here by EDJNet. In this way I could assign European cities to their respective sub-national level administrative units and compare the differences among European regions.