CEE Countries Lead Saily’s Internet Connectivity Index, but Cyber Safety Is More Complicated Than a Ranking

• CEE dominates Saily’s Internet Connectivity Index through balanced digital environments, not just faster networks
• Estonia and Lithuania lead overall, while Czechia demonstrates cybersecurity strength constrained by affordability
• Moldova’s surprising rise highlights internet freedom’s significant impact on overall connectivity rankings
• Experts emphasize how that national cyber resilience does not guarantee travelers’ everyday digital safety

Central and Eastern Europe is punching above its weight in Saily’s latest Internet Connectivity Index, with Estonia and Lithuania taking the top two spots and Czechia ranking fourth globally for cyber safety. Covering 97 countries, the research suggests that CEE’s strength is not necessarily the fastest networks, but the ability to combine internet quality, affordability, freedom, and cybersecurity into relatively balanced digital environments. For Saily’s CEO Vykintas Maknickas, that consistency is the key to understanding why several CEE countries sit near the top.

‘The strong CEE performance comes from well-rounded profiles, without particular exceptions in any single area. Estonia and Lithuania lead the entire index, and both got there by scoring high across all four dimensions at once instead of maxing out one and lagging on the rest,’ the CEO explains. He points to the region’s early investment in digital infrastructure and public services as part of the reason, noting Estonia’s digital ID and widespread e-government as examples of connectivity being treated as part of state-building rather than simply telecommunications infrastructure.

Estonia: Speed Isn’t Everything

Estonia illustrates the point particularly clearly, taking first place overall with a score of 65.98 despite ranking only 19th for internet quality. Lithuania follows at 65.55, while Denmark, Portugal and France complete the top five, and 13 of the 15 highest-ranked countries are European. The results therefore challenge the idea that the countries with the fastest networks necessarily offer the best overall internet experience.

‘What Estonia’s results tell us is that ‘best-connected’ is about more than how many megabits per second you can download. A traveller or a citizen needs the internet to be fast enough, yes, but also safe to use, open and unrestricted, and affordable,’ Mr Maknickas points out. Estonia’s position, he adds, comes from being strong across those different requirements rather than dominating a single technical measure.

Lithuania: Cybersecurity Strength

Lithuania’s second-place finish is particularly notable because it combines a strong cyber-safety result with respectable scores in the other three categories, including 10th for internet quality and 13th for freedom. Mr Maknickas attributes its second-place position to a national approach in which cybersecurity has become a policy priority, supported by institutions such as the country’s national cyber security centre and a mature regulatory framework. According to the authors, the broader result is significant because Lithuania is not relying on cyber safety alone: its relatively even performance across the four pillars is what keeps it near the top of the overall table.

Lithuania is also the home market of Saily’s parent company Nord Security, which was founded there in 2012 and continues to maintain a major operational presence in the country, including its headquarters in Vilnius.

Czechia: The Cost of Imbalance

Czechia offers almost the opposite lesson, ranking fourth globally for cyber safety but only 28th overall. Its weakness is affordability, where it ranks 86th, illustrating how a country can perform exceptionally in one part of the digital environment while losing ground elsewhere. That trade-off is central to Saily’s methodology, which gives equal weight to cyber safety, internet quality, freedom and affordability.

‘Czechia is a case where a single exceptional dimension doesn’t win the index. The four dimensions don’t automatically move together, and a country can be world-class in one while ordinary or poor in another,’ Mr Maknickas argues. He describes affordability as the particular drag on Czechia’s result, illustrating how the index is designed to reward countries that avoid major weaknesses rather than those that simply excel in one category.

Gulf States: Excelling Technical Performance

The divergence becomes even clearer outside CEE, particularly when comparing Europe with the Gulf states. The UAE and Qatar (alongside Singapore) occupy the top three positions for internet quality, yet none makes the overall top 15, while the European leaders generally combine less exceptional network performance with stronger results for freedom, affordability, and security.

‘The technical experience in the UAE, Qatar, and Singapore is superb, with fast, stable, well-covered networks. You can have a technically outstanding internet that is also heavily restricted and expensive to use,’ Mr Maknickas emphasizes. In that sense, the index is measuring something broader than infrastructure performance: whether people can actually make practical use of a connection without encountering major barriers around cost, access or security.

Moldova’s Dramatic Rise

Moldova provides another striking example of how the methodology can reshape the conventional picture of digital development. The country jumped into eighth place overall, helped by a ninth-place ranking for internet freedom and 12th for affordability, even though its internet quality and cyber safety scores are much less dominant.

Mr Maknickas attributes the dramatic rise primarily to the freedom result, while noting that the equally weighted methodology means a substantial movement in one dimension can have a pronounced effect on the overall ranking.

Beyond National Cybersecurity Scores

Such a national-level picture, however, does not necessarily tell an individual traveller how safe they will be when they connect to the internet abroad. Cyber security expert Olga Voloshyna argues that indicators such as infrastructure, incident-response capability, and legal protections are better understood as measures of a country’s cyber security readiness and maturity than as a direct measure of the safety of a traveller using hotel Wi-Fi or mobile banking.

‘Cyber security for a regular person often begins from quite practical issues: whether it’s safe to connect to a hotel’s Wi-Fi network, pay online for a service, or use their regular mobile banking abroad,’ Ms Voloshyna explains. She points at cyber resilience needing to be considered at the level of governments, businesses, and citizens, because national preparedness does not eliminate the everyday risks created by poor security practices or vulnerable services.

Why this distinction matters is because Saily’s index was deliberately designed around what travellers encounter when they cross a border, rather than as a comprehensive assessment of digital life in a particular place. The four dimensions behind Saily’s research were selected to capture the immediate experience of going online, while acknowledging that a resident-focused index would need measures such as fixed broadband, urban-rural connectivity gaps, digital public services, and inclusion. This distinction also helps explain why the index should be read less as a definitive league table of national digital development and more as a snapshot of how different pieces of connectivity come together for someone trying to get online.