Plugging Into The World’s Fastest Broadband

Britain’s Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is pledging to open the internet to every home in the UK by offering free superfast broadband – but who has the fastest and slowest connections?

Researchers have tracked broadband speeds across more than 200 countries with millions of connections.

The average global broadband speed is 11.03Mbps – and increase of 20% over last year.

“Those countries contributing the most to the rising average are those in developed nations which contain not only already-faster established infrastructure, but in which we’re also seeing the most significant rollout and uptake of the latest technology,” said the report by data compiler Cable.

What the difference in speed means to users

“There is comparatively little development – and therefore little change in availability and/or uptake of faster infrastructure – in the bottom half of the league table compared to the top.”

Out of the top 50 countries with the fastest data connection, 37 are in Europe, with the UK ranking 34^th – down one place from last year but lagging Madagascar and two thirds of other EU nations. The UK’s average broadband mean download speed is 22.37Mbps.

Madagascar has slightly faster broadband at 22.57Mbps.

Taiwan tops the table with lightning fast 85.02Mbps, while war-torn Yemen comes in as slowest with a speed of just 0.38Mbps.

So what does the difference in speed mean? Downloading a 5Gb movie takes 8 minutes and 2 seconds in Taiwan, 30 minutes 31 seconds in the UK but a crawling  30 hours 1 minute and 40 seconds in Yemen.

Top 20 global broadband speeds

Source: Cable.co.uk

Bottom 10 global broadband speeds

Source: Cable.co.uk