In Romania, there are 18.8 million connections to the Internet (June 2016). Romania's country code (top level domain) is .ro. The .eu domain is also used, as it is shared with other European Union member states. There were over 600 000 domains registered under .ro at the end of 2012.
Average speed
Internet usage skyrocketed in Romania after 1999, with small neighborhood Internet service providers that were affordable and with high speeds, bypassing use of copper wires or dial-up methods. This coupled with low population and land mass helps with keeping up a high average speed
According to a top made by Akamai in Q3 2016, Romania was ranked 10th in the world in terms of average Internet peak connection speed with 85 Mbit/s. In Akamai's The State of the Internet Report covering the fourth quarter of 2012, Romania came 4th on average peak connection speed by EMEA country/region.
In 2021, Romania ranked 5th in the world in terms of Internet connection via fixed broadband, having median download speeds of 214 Mbit/s.
Download speed
Based on Net Index report at the end of first half of 2013, Timișoara became the city with the highest download speed in the world. Timișoara had a download speed of 89.91 Mbit/s.The second Romanian city which appeared in the ranking was Constanța, in 14th place, with a speed of 34.45 Mbit/s. The capital Bucharest came 19th, with speeds of 33.57 Mbit/s, and Brașov, 27th, with 31.01 Mbit/s. World City Ranking requires at least 75,000 unique IP addresses for a given city.
Based on Net Index data from April 2015, Cristesti is the Romanian town with the fastest internet speed of 139.12 Mbit/s. This is surprising giving the fact that major cities are usually ranked lower on the list, Bucharest being listed at number 6 and Iasi is present in 9th position. Romania is one of the countries with the fastest fixed internet connection speeds and also one of the cheapest, with 1 Gbit/s internet connections being sold for around 8 euros a month.
Internet Service Providers
Total number of active providers, as of June, 2017: 871
Twisted pair Ethernet, satellite, other: 655 providers
Coaxial Cable (cable modem) Access: 27 providers, Optical Fiber Access: 164 providers, xDSL Access: 5 providers.
Broadband Internet access
Broadband penetration as of June 2017: 23.5 broadband connections for every 100 people.
Distribution of broadband connections by type, as reported by Ancom, is as follows 94% FTTx (FTTH/FTTB/FTTC/FTTN) internet access connections, 4.8% Coaxial cable,0.2% other.
In Romania, broadband internet has been available since 2000, through coaxial cable, first from Kappa (now owned by UPC) and currently from DIGI and UPC. Recent speeds range between 10 Mbit/s and 1000 Mbit/s for household targeted plans, and the data traffic is unmetered.
However, the most popular broadband services are provided by micro-ISPs (known locally as "reţea de bloc/reţea de cartier" (Block/Neighborhood Networks)) with 50 to 3000 customers each. These ISPs usually provide their services through Ethernet over twisted pair, with a number of particularities and peculiarities: most were grassroot organizations and still have a feeling of community between subscribers and the management, speeds are usually divided in three categories: "LAN", "Metropolitan" and "International" with Metropolitan meaning a limited number of networks with which the micro-ISP has a peering agreement and sometimes the cable internet providers. Generally, for such broadband connections, speeds are 1000 Mbit/s locally, 1-100 Mbit/s metro and 256-2048 kbit/s International. Some of these micro-ISP function completely legally, while others (generally the smaller ones) are organized informally in something like a permanent LAN party. Many of these micro-ISPs formed organizations to represent their common interests and provide for integration of services (one such organization is Interlan, covering the whole of Bucharest). Speeds, uptime, quality of service are generally not guaranteed, and while the biggest networks offer high quality connections and / 30 Mbit/s upload international technical support, for the smallest ones, there is even the risk of network cards burning because of lightning strikes and badly insulated network infrastructure.