Ever wondered which countries provide the most rapid Internet experience? The map above shows the world according to average connection speed in Mbits/s, as recorded by Akamai - the content delivery network (CDN) responsible for serving between 15 and 30 per cent of all web traffic.

The figures relate to the first quarter of 2015 - follow this link for full details on how they are calculated, or this one to download a more recent (2015, Q3) report.

A couple of places appear surprisingly high up. The Norwegian island pairing of Svalbard and Jan Mayen, for example, has an average connection speed of 36.5Mbits/s - the highest of all. But it only has one unique IP address, so the result is somewhat skewed. The lofty positions of The Vatican (3rd) and Antarctica (27th) are also due to the low number of readings.

Akamai's official rankings only take into account countries or regions with a unique IP count of at least 25,000, which gives South Korea the true top spot, followed by Ireland, Hong Kong, Sweden, The Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland. Norway, Latvia and Finland complete the top 10.

Scandinavian countries took several of the top 10 spots

The 10 countries with the fastest internet speeds

South Korea Ireland Hong Kong Sweden Netherlands Japan Switzerland Norway Latvia Finland

The UK is 23rd in the ranking, the US 20th, Australia 50th and China 111th. The world average is 5mbps, according to the report. The majority of the worst performing countries are in Africa, the South Pacific, the Middle East and South America.

Akamai also calculates the average peak connection speed. In this ranking Singapore comes out on top (98.5Mbits/s), followed by Hong Kong (92.6Mbits/s), South Korea (79Mbits/s), Kuwait (76.5Mbits/s) and Romania (71.6Mbits/s). The UK comes 27th (51.6Mbits/s) and the US 22nd (53.3Mbits/s).

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