UK still lagging in European broadband speed league as it ranks seventeenth

The UK is still a long way from achieving its goal of being the fastest broadband nation in Europe as it continues to languish far down the European league tables for internet connections according to data from Akamai.

The firm's quarterly State of the Internet report places the UK in seventeenth place in Europe, with an average speed of 5.1Mbit/s, far below the Netherlands which tops the list, with an 8.5Mbit/s average connection speed.

Furthermore no UK city cracked the top 100 global locations for average connection speed, a list dominated by the South Koreans and Japanese. Taegu in Korea ranked as the world's best city for internet connections at an average of 21.5Mbit/s.

The best ranked city in the UK was Bradford, which has ranked within the top 100 on a previous occasion, with an average connection speed of 6.7Mbit/s, placing it at 125, while London has a lowly 4Mbit/s average.

This means the UK is some way short of the promise made by the coalition government that it would ensure the nation has the best broadband connections in Europe by ensuring 90 per cent of the population can access 100Mbit/s connections by 2015.

David Belson, director of market intelligence at Akamai, told V3 that the figures showed there while the UK, and many other nations, have work to do, funding programmes could help meet this challenge.

"Lots of governments have put funding forward but it will take time for that funding to manifest itself into the actual rollout of fibre in ducts and on poles. This should start to have an impact in the coming years," he said.

"Hopefully the people that are responsible for the allocation of funding and the projects themselves won't waste too much time providing what is necessary for this to happen."

Elsewhere the firm also revealed figures that the nation responsible for most attack traffic is Indonesia, where 14 per cent of all detected malicious traffic originates. Taiwan is second with 11 per cent and China third with 8.6 per cent.

Meanwhile attack traffic from the US was down for the third quarter in a row, from 10 per cent to 7.3, which Belson attributed to a clampdown by law enforcement agencies on those responsible for the activity and improved patching of IT systems.