If you live in the US and think the internet speeds are as fast, you may be surprised to find out that the country is actually ranked 26th in a list of average global download speeds. In the eye-catching infographic below the US (outside of Google’s offices that is) looking like a digital laggard, but who could be sitting pretty at the top?
Digital download delivery company Pando surveyed about 35 petabytes (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes) of data from 27 million downloads from 20 million computers in 224 countries, and found that South Korea has the world’s fastest internet service, in terms of download speed. The country averaged download speeds of 17.62 Mbps. Compared to the download speeds in the US, 4.93 Mbps, South Korea is lightning fast…
As you can see in the map below, the majority of countries with the slowest speeds are in developing nations in Africa and Asia. This makes sense since broadband access is hard to come by in most African countries. It’s interesting to see that developed countries like the US, France, Canada, and the UK didn’t even make it into the Top 20.
You’ll find the fastest internet in the US in Andover, MA, which has download speeds of 22.41 Mbps. However, the fastest city on Earth, Seocho, South Korea, boasts speeds of 33.5 Mbps. South Korea is truly fast. In fact, the only cities in the Top 10 that aren’t in South Korea are Andover, and Bucharest, Romania.
Other countries with super fast speeds include Romania, which has the second fastest internet speed in the world at 15.27 Mbps. The other three countries in the Top five include Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Latvia. As China surpasses the US market in terms of PC sales, its Internet speeds are still behind that of the US at just 1.96 Mbps. However, 1.96 Mbps sounds good compared to the speeds you get in Congo, the country with the slowest internet speeds in the world that clock in at 13KBps.
The study also looked at data by ISP. The fastest ISP in the US is Verizon internet service which, on average, is 153 Kilobytes per second faster than the runner-up, Comcast. For competing numbers, don’t miss PC Mag’s fastest ISP testing.
Read more at Pando, via Mashable
