The countries with the fastest internet in the world have been re-assessed in 2019. Read our insights from the study and browse the rankings below.
If you’re one of the millions of people working in a remote job or pursuing a career as a digital nomad, then internet speed is one of the important factors in your choice of destination.
Internet comparison site Cable has ranked the countries with the fastest broadband internet in the world based on over 267 million speed tests across 207 countries or territories. It is the third year of the assessment and the 2019 ranking uses data collected in the 12 months up to 8th May 2019.
KEY HEADLINES
- The global average broadband internet speed is 11.03Mbps (megabits per second).
- Taiwan has the fastest internet speed in the world overtaking Singapore with an average speed of 85.02Mbps.
- Yemen has the slowest internet speed in the world with an average speed of just 0.38Mbps.
It would take over 30 hours to download a 5GB movie file in Yemen while someone in Taiwan could do it in eight minutes. - The five countries with the fastest internet have download speeds around 125 times faster than the five slowest.
- 37 of the 50 countries with the fastest internet are located in Europe, with 10 in Asia or Oceania (Asia-Pacific), two in North America and just one in Africa.
- 141 countries have average speeds below 10Mbps, a speed deemed by UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom to be the minimum required to cope with the demands of a typical family or small business.
Unsurprisingly, Europe has the world’s highest concentration of countries with the fastest internet. Jersey is Europe’s fastest jurisdiction, offering an average speed of 67.46Mbps. Sweden is Europe’s fastest country with an average speed of 55.18Mbps.
Denmark (5) and Luxembourg (7) are not far behind with average speeds of 43.99 and 40.12Mbps respectively. Of the 54 territories measured in Europe, only Turkey (102) and Armenia (110) are outside the top 100.
The UK is in 34th place, up one place and 3.8 MBps faster than last year with an average speed of 22.37Mbps.
The Asia-Pacific region is a more mixed bag with some of the fastest territories in the world – Taiwan (1) Singapore (2), Japan (6), New Zealand (17) and Hong Kong (19) – and some of the slowest: Timor-Leste (206), Turkmenistan (203), Tajikistan (192) and Afghanistan (184).
The US (15) has the fastest broadband in the Americas with an average speed of 32.89Mbps. Generally, Latin American countries are at the slower end of the regional scale. The Cayman Islands has the region’s fastest internet with an average speed of 16.12Mbps. Venezuela (183) has the slowest speeds in the Americas with an average speed of just 1.37Mbps.
Of the slowest countries for broadband, 12 are in the Arab States, 10 are in Asia & Pacific and three are in Latin America. Only UAE (67) and Bahrain (94) of the Arab States are not in the bottom 100.
Africa is some distance behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband provision with 25 of the 50 slowest-performing countries in Africa. Madagascar is the fastest African nation in 33rd place with an average speed of 22.57Mbps.
Here's the rank (Southeast Asian rank is sorted out below the table):
Source: Atlastandboots.com
