Posted: 14th Jan, 2010 By: MarkJ
The latest quarterly global '
State of the Internet (Q3-2009)' report from
Akamai has revealed that the UK places a lowly 26th in the world for broadband ISP download speed with a national average of just 3483Kbps (3.5Mbps); this compares with Ofcom's April 2009 estimate of 4.1Mbps. By contrast the global average increased by 13% during 2009 to reach a measly 1.7Mbps, largely because 103 countries had average connection speeds below 1Mbps.
Top 10 Fastest Broadband Countries
1. South Korea 14.6Mbps (Yearly change 16%)
2. Japan 7.9Mbps (11%)
3. H ong Kong 7.6Mbps (13%)
4. R omania 6.2Mbps (12%)
5. Sweden 5.7Mbps (6.2%)
6. Ireland 5.3Mbps (73%)
7. N etherlands 5.2Mbps (18%)
8. Switzerland 5.0Mbps (1.0%)
9. D enmark 4.8Mbps (7.7%)
10. C zech Republic 4.8Mbps (23%)
...
18. United States 3.9Mbps (-2.4%)
26. United Kingdom 3.5Mbps (?)
South Korea came top in the world for average broadband download speeds with a score of 14.6Mbps, while the dominant European country was Sweden on 5.7Mbps. It's worth pointing out that both Sweden and South Korea have a lot of 100Mbps fibre optic broadband infrastructure, which just goes to show that not everybody will get the best speed even when the network supports it. We've pasted a full chart of all the results below.
The full report and above chart also include data on which countries were the sources for most Attack Traffic (distributed denial of service attacks etc.) and unique IP (Internet Protocol) addresses (good gauge of penetration by country per Internet connected computer).
We expect that the UK will eventually creep up the list, especially once BT begins deploying its faster FTTH/P/C (40 to 100Mbps) broadband services over the coming months. The increased rollout of faster 'up to' 24Mbps based ADSL2+ services from BT and unbundled providers should also have an impact.