Sweden has the fastest broadband speeds in Europe - and the third fastest in the world - when measured by real-world performance, a recent study found.
Sweden was beaten only by Korea and Japan, which this year switched places so that Korea has the fastest broadband connections in the world, according to recent research.
Researchers within the business faculties of Oxford University and the University of Oviedo analyzed the results of 24 million broadband performance tests conducted by speedtest.net.
The researchers combined download, upload and latency speed results to provide a weighted score of real-world performance, measured as broadband quality of service (BQoS).
Nearly all of the 66 countries analyzed have improved broadband performance since 2008, the researchers found, with 93.9% lifting download and upload speeds and overall BQoS, and 84.8% reducing latency.
Sweden was followed closely behind by Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Romania.
These countries, Japan and Korea are the only countries in the world adequately equipped to handle the bandwidth demands that are coming in the near future, the researchers said.
Most of Europe has enough bandwidth to easily cover today's demands, but Malta and Cyprus do not.
Central Europe beat Western Europe by 2.2 points when ranked by average BQoS, they added.
The study was sponsored by Cicso.