Fastest Broadband Rank- Global Broadband Race

Which country has the fastest broadband speed? Don't know! but surely we're not. South Korea has the fastest broadband by a large margin, recording a 14.6 Mbps average speed, while Japan occupies the second spot with an average speed of 7.9 Mbps.
Sweden took the top position in Europe with an average speed of 5.7 Mbps, with Ireland closely following behind on 5.3 Mbps. Britain has come a disappointing 26th in the global competition to have the fastest broadband, according to a new survey.With an average download speed of just 3.5 Mbps, Britain has been ranked 26th in the world by Akamai’s ‘The State of the Internet (Q3-2009)’ report. Despite other reports recently stating Britain’s average broadband speed to be slightly higher than 3.5 Mbps, such as broadband.co.uk which calculated it to be closer to 4.478 Mbps, this still would not have qualified the UK to make it into the top 10 fastest countries.

In a report tracking a more limited number of countries, published by the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development last month, Britain ranked 21st out of the 30 countries surveyed - falling behind the likes of Greece and Spain.

Japan, Finland and Sweden made up the top three countries with the widest provision of high-speed broadband and Belgium, Turkey and Mexico made up the bottom three.

The OECD’s figures also showed that the UK came 13th out of 30 countries when it came to broadband penetration, again falling behind the likes of Finland, Denmark and Sweden, but beating the US, Greece and France.

It predicted that fibre optic networks are likely to be the technology that generates the most future growth in broadband uptake, as opposed to cable networks and urged for continual investment.

The OECD said: “This upgrade [to fibre optic networks] is important because high-speed broadband networks are increasingly seen as a fundamental infrastructure for the economy, like roads, water and electricity. Telecommunication firms have been investing heavily to upgrade older copper and coax networks to fibre to accommodate our ever increasing thirst for bandwidth.

“The economic crisis has threatened to halt this investment just as consumers and businesses are using more internet bandwidth. Many governments have stepped in to fill the gap using stimulus funds to pay for new broadband networks. But there is still a lot of debate about whether these investments make economic sense, particularly as governments are wading into an area which has recently been entrusted to the private sector.”

The Digital Britain report aims to generate more money to fund the increased roll-out of faster broadband with a monthly 50 pence tax on fixed landlines. This proposal will be included in the imminent Finance Bill.

The global average broadband speed has risen by 13 per cent on the quarter, according to Akamai’s report, coming in at 1.7 Mbps. This was largely due to the fact that there are many countries with average connection speeds which are still less than 1Mbps.


source:telegraph.co.uk

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