Which county has the world's fastest Internet service? How about South Korea. That's according to a new study from content delivery service Pando Networks that sampled some 35 petabytes of data from 27 million downloads and 224 countries. The service found that South Korea is top in the world in terms of download speed, averaging 17.62 Mbps. Romania has the second fastest Internet speeds on the planet, clocking in at 15.27 Mbps, and a trio of Eastern European countries round out the top five, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia. The United States musters a very pedestrian 4.93 Mbps — good for 26th in the world — while China, home to the world's largest Internet population, manages a dismal 1.96 Mbps.

The slowest Internet, according to the study, is in the Congo, with an average of just 13 KBps, a speed that would make even a 1990s dial-up Internet user cringe. Most of the world's slowest countries on Pando's list are located in Africa, where broadband access is sparse and mobile is often the most prevalent point of access for users. However, we suspect that the data from some countries may have suffered from too small a sample size for an accurate reading.

If you want the fastest Internet in the United States, head to Andover, Mass., the only American city to crack the top 10. Andover residents are downloading at a very speedy average of 22.41 Mbps. That pales in comparison to speeds in Seocho, South Korea, though, the fastest city on Earth at 33.5 Mbps.

Pando also sliced up the data by ISP, gathering data on 18,017 of them. The fastest in the U.S. is Verizon Internet Services, which offers users average downloads that are 153 Kilobytes per second faster than the next closest ISP on the list (Comcast). Those speeds are still almost five times slower the average connection offered by Dacom Corp. in South Korea, which takes the cake as the world's fastest ISP by average download speed.

Pando provided Mashable with the infographic below illustrating some of the key findings in the report. The company also created an interactive map showing all of the findings.





