The UK manages to trump 185 other countries, yet falls behind 34 others, and behind 18 Western European countries. This puts the UK in the slowest half in the Western Europe region when it comes to average broadband speed, despite the large improvement in average speed since our last report 12 months ago.

As seen in the league table, downloading an HD movie of 5GB in size would take 2m 36s at the average speed experienced in table-topper Macau, while it would take 14h 46m in last-placed Turkmenistan.

30 of the top 50 fastest-performing countries are located in Europe (Eastern, Western and Baltics), with eight in Asia (Ex. Near East), three in the Caribbean region, three in South America, four in Northern America, one in Sub-Saharan Africa and one in Oceania. By contrast, 29 of the 50 slowest-performing countries are located in Sub-Saharan or Northern Africa, six are in Asia (Ex. Near East), five are in the Near East, three are in the CIS (Former USSR) region, five are in Oceania, and one each in South America and the Caribbean region.

67 countries failed to achieve average speeds of 10Mbps or greater, the speed deemed by UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom to be the minimum required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business. This is down from 94 countries in 2021, and 109 countries in 2020, indicating significant speed improvements are ongoing in many parts of the world.

Commenting on the worldwide rankings, Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Cable.co.uk, said: 
"The fastest average speeds in the world are no longer accelerating away from the rest of the field, since FTTP/pure fibre saturation is hitting its current limits in many of the fastest locations.

"Meanwhile, though the countries occupying the bottom end of the table still suffer from extremely poor speeds, the average speed of the bottom 10% is steadily improving, though don't expect to be streaming HD movies in those countries anytime soon.

"Europe absolutely dominates the leaderboard once again thanks to largely excellent infrastructure. In all cases, those countries ranking highest are those with a strong focus on pure fibre (FTTP) networks, with those countries dawdling too much on FTTC and ADSL solutions slipping further down year-on-year. There is also a strong correlation between the size of the geographical area in question and the speed offered, with smaller countries/locations easier to service and upgrade and therefore often offering faster average speeds."