The UAE and Qatar are ranked sixth and seventh respectively in the world for adoption of fast broadband services, said a new report.

The UAE has a combined fixed and mobile broadband BDI score of 682 out of 1,000 for 2015, while Qatar’s score is 681, according to the Broadband Development Index (BDI) of Ovum, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The index gave each country a score of up to 500 for mobile broadband and the same for fixed broadband.

Those scores put the UAE and Qatar ahead of the US and Canada, which are ranked eighth and 10th respectively with scores of 669 and 612. South Korea is the highest-ranked country in the BDI for 2015, with a score of 945. South Korea is followed in the rankings by Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Andorra.

“The high scores and rankings achieved by the UAE and Qatar in Ovum’s Broadband Development Index reflect the impressive level of development within the telecoms markets in these countries, and broadband connectivity continues to offer solid growth prospects in the Middle East,” said Matthew Reed, practice leader for Middle East & Africa at Ovum.

Further growth in broadband connectivity in the Middle East is expected, said Reed.

At several operators in the advanced Gulf markets, more than 20 per cent of mobile subscriptions are already based on LTE devices, and Ovum forecasts that the number of mobile LTE subscriptions in the Middle East will rise from 28.7 million at end-2015 to 156.1 million in 2020. - TradeArabia News Service