ATHENS – Greece keeps pitching people with technological skills to come live, work – and pay taxes – in the country with jobs that allow them to be anywhere, but hasn’t given them what they need: a fast, reliable Internet

The so-called Digital Nomads have Information Technology (IT) jobs that use their computers and can work in almost any country if their businesses allow and Greece is a particular lure for many reasons, but not its lumbering Internet that breaks up intermittently.

A survey by the cyber security company Surfshark that has Virtual Private Networks (VPN’s) showed Greece’s fixed Internet is the slowest in Europe and yet among the most expensive for relatively poor service.

That’s despite recent upgrades in services and promises of faster speeds and fiber optics but it’s expensive compared to people’s incomes and not always reliable, reported Kathimerini.

The company evaluated five criteria: Internet affordability, Internet quality, electronic infrastructure, electronic security and also electronic government, which the New Democracy government has accelerated.

Based on the 2022 index, Greece dropped one place from 2021, ranking 39th among 117 countries worldwide because it improved only in digital governance that is being pushed more.

The report also shows that an Internet user in Greece needs to work 12 minutes a month to buy 1 GB of data for his mobile phone, six times more than what is needed in Bulgaria and 149 times more than Israel.

Greece is ranked 55th among 117 countries, with the low performance mainly related to the speed of fixed internet connections and for mobile Internet speed it is 20th and 84th for Internet speed at home.

For Internet security though, Greece ranks first, which is critical for businesses and government agencies who can be targets of increasingly more sophisticated hackers.

In e-governance, the country ranks 55th from 59th last year, with the improvement due to the readiness of the state and businesses to use Artificial Intelligence, the paper said.

The survey was said to be especially important given how people turned more to computers and mobile phones during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic for online shopping, banking and entertainment for streaming platforms that require higher Internet speeds.