Who has the fastest Internet? Report sheds light on most- and least-connected countries.

Wondering where the best places in the world are to plug in? A new report has the answers, but are we any closer to a global village?

The report details countries, regions, and cities that seem to have to the most impressive broadband capabilities
— and, conversely, which seem to offer the least-capable connections to the global Internet.

So who wins? South Korea, with both the highest average connection bandwidth to Internet users (17.5 Mbps) as well as the highest average peak bandwidth delivered to users — a whopping 47.9 Mbps. At those speeds, a typical movie can be downloaded in in its entirety in high-definition in just over 30 minutes. A typical song download? Less than three and a half seconds.

Who are the losers? Countries like Cuba, the Solomon Islands, the Comoros, East Timor, Eritrea, Chad, Niger, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), all of whom measured as having average connection speeds under 300kbps. That same high definition movie would take more than 30 hours to download at 300kbps.

The United States? the report puts the U.S. at thirteenth in the world, with an average connection speed of 5.8 Mbps. That same HD movie would take over an hour and a half to download — meaning — on average and all things being equal (which they never are) — Americans with broadband have just barely enough bandwidth to stream a single high-definition movie in real time, if they don’t do much else on their Internet connection at the same time.

 

Fastest countries

According to the report's data, the top ten the countries with the highest average broadband connection speeds are:

1. South Korea
2. Japan
3. Hong Kong
4. The Netherlands
5. Latvia
6. Switzerland
7. Ireland
8. Czech Republic
9. Romania
10. Belgium

However, there’s a massive gap between South Korea and the rest of the world: South Korea’s average broadband connection speed was 17.5 Mbps; number-two Japan’s was 9.1 Mbps — meaning the average South Korean broadband Internet connection is almost twice the bandwidth (92 percent faster) than the average connection in Japan. South Korea is ahead — way ahead!

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