Mobile broadband modems are flying off the shelves in Sweden, but services in which users claim they were offered speeds of 7.2 megabits per second achieved an average of only 1.6 megabits per second, according to Bredbandskollen, a broadband information service.

Bredbandskollen carried out 720,000 measurements of broadband speeds on Swedish mobile broadband modems in July. Some eighty percent of tests showed speeds under 2.5 megabits per second.

The main operators themselves say a satisfactory result is 0.6 megabits per second. 31 percent of Telia’s customers, 22 percent of 3 customers, 25 percent of Telenor customers and 41 percent of Tele 2 customer failed to achieve this speed.

“Our statistics show that many users don’t even come close to 7.2 megabits per second. It is remarkable that mobile broadband is advertised as having this kind of speed,” said Bredbandskollen’s Rickard Dahlstrand.

Dahlstrand said he would like operators to market their services as having speeds of between 0.6 and 7.2 megabits per second, and to guarantee that customers would achieve the lower end of this range.