UK falls off list of world's fastest broadband locations

Masan in South Korea is officially the world's fastest online city, averaging a maximum connection speed of 40.5Mbit/s, according to web content firm Akamai.

The latest Akamai State of the Internet report also found that Asian countries lead the way in broadband, and that 59 Japanese cities feature in the top 100 for average measured connection speeds.

The highest ranking European city is Umea in Sweden, which ranked 18th with 9.6Mbit/s. Twelve cities in the US made the top 100, seven of them in California.

The UK had no cities in the top 100. Oxford, which last time ranked fifth, disappeared completely after Akamai changed its metrics to remove university network connections which can distort the results.

David Belson, Akamai's director of market intelligence, explained that the dominance of Asian cities in the top 100 means that the rest of the world will be playing catch up for a long time.

"Countries like South Korea have benefited from a number of factors, such as population density and proactive government support and funding for broadband deployment, which has given them their position at the top," he said.

"Government intervention in other countries, like the US or the UK, indicates the right intentions in solving this issue, but I think there has been some surprise at the market's failure to meet this demand itself."

Unsurprisingly, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan took the top three positions in the top 10 list of countries, followed by six European countries, at an average of 15Mbit/s. The US was placed eighth with an average speed of 16Mbit/s.

The world is moving at a more equal pace when it comes to mobile connectivity, however. The report found that average maximum connection speeds from 83 of the 109 mobile providers are greater than 2Mbit/s.

Furthermore, 33 operators achieved maximum measured speeds greater than 5Mbit/s and six went to 10Mbit/s. Interestingly, the highest and lowest averages were from two different suppliers in Slovakia, where speeds range between 7.2Mbit/s and 105Kbit/s.

"It could be that one firm has lots of smartphone users so has to have a fast network, while another may have predominately feature-phone users, hence the very low speeds," Belson said by way of a possible explanation for the disparity.

On a more negative slant, the report observed attack traffic originating from a whopping 198 unique countries/regions.

Russia remained the biggest source of attack traffic for the third quarter running, accounting for 12 per cent of all traffic monitored, while the US remained in second place at 10 per cent. China held third place at 9.1 per cent, followed by Taiwan, Brazil and Italy.

The figures are gathered from information relating to billions of internet requests from millions of unique IP addresses carried out across Akamai's global server network.

Top nations by average maximum broadband connection speed:

1. South Korea 33Mbit/s
2. Hong Kong 30Mbit/s
3. Japan 16Mbit/s
4. Romania 25Mbit/s
5. Sweden 19Mbit/s
6. Latvia 19Mbit/s
7. Belgium 17Mbit/s
8. US 16Mbit/s
9. Portugal 16Mbit/s
10. Bulgaria 15Mbit/s