UK placed 27th in world’s fastest broadband

broadband speeds

The UK has been shown to lag behind when it comes to broadband speeds, thanks to a new report released this week.

Akamai's latest "state of the internet" report, for the first quarter of 2010, showed the UK coming in just 27th place out of 201 countries, clocking in an average speed of only 3.8Mbps.

This is down from 23rd place in the report from the fourth quarter of 2009.

This was compared to world leaders in broadband, South Korea, which came in with an average of 12Mbps, followed by Hong Kong on 9Mbps and Japan on 7.8Mbps.

The UK also failed to break into the top 100 cities when it came to the increasingly important arena of broadband speeds. Instead Japan dominated with 53 cities, followed by South Korea with 11.

Europe only had eight cities across five countries make the list, four of which were in Romania.

The UK and Germany were also the only two countries covered by the report not to have shown accelerated growth in internet penetration over the quarter.

Last week a report by Ofcom and SamKnows showed an average broadband speed in the UK of 5.2Mbps. However, the UK regulator accused ISPs of leading customers on, advertising unachievable connection speeds for their area.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.