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Nov. 24 (UPI) — The Chilean city of Valparaíso has the fastest fixed broadband Internet in the world, according to the Speedtest Global Index, which ranks average connection speeds based on user tests.

The port city leads the latest ranking with an average download speed of 398.21 megabits per second, surpassing major cities such as Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, which placed second with 376 Mbps and Lyon, France, which ranked third.

In the United States, Los Angeles is the first city to appear in the ranking, in 11th place, followed by New York in 12th.

Valparaíso ranked ahead of Chile’s capital, Santiago, because it sits in a strategic location for technology companies that use the city as a hub for developing fiber-optic infrastructure for Chile, South America and connections to Oceania.

“Valparaíso is the landing point for submarine cables such as Google’s Curie, América Móvil’s Mistral and SAC, which add capacity and redundancy to the connectivity ecosystem, while Google’s Humboldt transpacific cable with the Chilean government is set to land in Valparaíso in 2027,” Danilo Bórquez, who holds a doctorate in complex systems engineering and is a professor at the Adolfo Ibáñez University’s engineering school, told UPI.

He added that residents of Valparaíso have faster and more stable Wi-Fi.

“With more than 300 Mbps you can have several users online at the same time. Video calls run smoothly and game or photo downloads and backups are much faster. You can also hold classes or use educational platforms without interruptions, with materials downloading in seconds or minutes,” Bórquez said.

At the national level, fiber-optic adoption is high. “In Chile, it accounts for about 70% of fixed connections, which drives the typical speeds measured by Speedtest. There are companies that can migrate or extend fiber to another 4.3 million households in Chile, which increases the base of users with high-speed plans.”

Marco Aravena, director of Modernization and Digital Transformation and a computer engineering professor at the University of Valparaíso, told UPI that service providers come to the city to expand fiber-optic Internet access.

“In Valparaíso you have Las Torpederas beach, where one of the submarine cables that brings fiber-optic connections from other parts of the world comes ashore. We are one of the technology hubs through which internet arrives in Chile. It’s not that users connect directly to that fiber, but they have more direct access to it,” he said.

Experts say these factors make Valparaíso attractive for people who want to work in hybrid or remote roles.

“Valparaíso is becoming a hub that allows people to come live and work here because of its strong connectivity. It also attracts students because there are many universities in the city,” Aravena said.

However, the city has significant investment in technology and networks but little investment in infrastructure or economic development.

According to the latest 2024 Urban Quality of Life Index from the Catholic University, Valparaíso scored medium-high in connectivity and mobility, but low in housing and surroundings and medium-low in health and the environment.

At what point is the threshold crossed for a player making a clear impact on the goalkeeper? The only way you could end these discussions is to make a decision objective, but we should be wary of unintended consequences.

Would we get more consistent decisions? No doubt, but as we have seen with the handball law if you add more absolutes that simply results in more disallowed goals.

How about saying that a player being offside in the six-yard box always has to be impacting a goalkeeper? You would still have shades of grey and potentially goals disallowed which are against the spirit of the law.

If the offside player is at the opposite side of the goal to the keeper, would we really want a goal to be ruled out? If you are being objective, it would have to be.

That does not feel like a road we would want to go down, which leaves us still with a subjective conundrum.

VARs are told not to get involved in subjective offside unless a clear error has been made either way. This is why interventions are quite rare, and the borderline decisions like Andy Robertson at Manchester City cause most controversy.

Last season, there were only two VAR interventions on line of vision, and they both resulted in disallowed goals being awarded: Bernardo Silva for Manchester City at Wolves and Jamie Vardy for Leicester at Fulham.

In 2023-24, four goals were disallowed for the offence: Rasmus Hojlund for Manchester United at Burnley, Mohamed Salah for Liverpool at Burnley, Lorenz Assignon for Burnley at Crystal Palace and Tawanda Chirewa for Wolves against West Ham.

Supporters will understandably use these for comparison but while two decisions can be similar they will never be exactly the same. For that reason, we will always have perceived inconsistencies.