Akamai has released its latest global 'State of the Internet (Q4-2009)' report to the fourth quarter of last year. It reveals that the UK continues to do poorly in the global league table of fixed line broadband ISP download speeds with a national average of just 3706Kbps (3.7Mbps). At least that's an increase from 3.5Mbps in Q3-2009 and puts us just a few places below the USA.

By contrast the global average measured broadband connection speed held fairly steady at 1.7Mbps (due to rounding). Ironically the 5th fastest city in the world is Oxford [England] with an average broadband speed of 14.5Mbps (14463Kbps). The top 4 slots were held by Berkeley, CA [USA] (18730Kbps), Chapel Hill, NC [USA] (17483Kbps), Stanford, CA [USA] (16956Kbps) and Mason [South Korea] (14969Kbps).

The report also found that there was a fairly wide range of average measured Mobile Broadband connection speeds, ranging from 3.2Mbps on an Austrian mobile provider, down to 106Kbps (0.1Mbps) on an operator in Slovakia. In the UK speeds varied between 1.27Mbps and just under 2.8Mbps, though specific operators were not named.