South Korea tops "fastest broadband" charts - Warc News

News: January 19, 2010

South Korea tops "fastest broadband" charts

SEOUL: South Korea and Japan are the nations with the highest broadband speeds, figures from Akamai show.

The US tech firm said South Korean users enjoyed an average connection speed of 14.6 Mbps over the three-month period.

Japan was at second place on 7.9 Mbps and Hong Kong was third on 7.6 Mbps.

The rankings reflect the higher penetration of fibre optic broadband infrastructure in east Asia, with other regions more likely to use slower ADSL cables to connect to the web.

Akamai's top-rated European nations were Romania and Sweden, which attained averages of 6.2 Mbps and 5.7Mbps respectively.

Globally, the typical broadband speed rose by 18% to reach 1.7 Mbps over the three-month period.

Japan, Finland and Sweden were the nations where usage of high-speed broadband - such as fibre optic - was highest, with Belgium, Turkey and Mexico taking the bottom three positions on the list.

Speeds offered by internet services accessed via smartphones were also offered by Akamai for the first time in the survey's history, reflecting the increasing popularity of mobile internet among global users.

The typical connection speeds offered by three US providers over the past year were found to be 700-800 Kbps.

However, "significant variability" in average user speeds were recorded over the 12-month period.

Akamai surveyed a total of 444m unique IP addresses in 226 nations for its survey.

Users in 103 of these countries had average connection speeds of 1 Mbps or less.

Data sourced from Akamai/ZDNet/Computer Weekly; additional content by Warc staff, 19 January 2010

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