Dubai: The UAE retains its position as the country with the ‘fastest mobile network speed’ in the first quarter of 2021, according to the latest findings by Ookla.

With a download speed of 178.52 Mbps in March, the UAE overtook South Korea and Qatar in the mobile broad speedtest, continuing what it had done in January and February, with download speeds of 183.03 Mbps and 177.10 Mbps, respectively.

The Speed Test Global index assesses over 135 countries on internet speed data done on a monthly basis. Data for the index comes from the hundreds of millions of tests taken by real people using the speed test every month.

Mobile network speed is a major contributing factor to the economic wealth and social prosperity of a nation. This achievement has a lot of favourable implications for a enabling environment for future aspirations, country’s ICT agenda, productivity of businesses, amongst others.

“Etisalat is proud to contribute to the UAE ranking first in terms of mobile network speed,” the telco said in a statement. “This is yet another milestone achievement for the UAE, the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority as well as Etisalat’s testament to its relentless efforts towards its strategy and vision to ‘Drive the digital future to empower societies’.”