A global research and speed tests conducted on behalf of Cisco IT firm show that only nine countries have developed their broadband infrastructure to meet the future demands like watching high definition video content. The US and many European nations including Switzerland, Germany and Norway indeed have high-quality networks only to comfortably meet today’s needs, but not ready for the future. UK is placed among the nations that can just meet the needs of today.

Oxford University’s Säid Business School and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics have jointly conducted this survey on 66 nations around the world. Around 24 million speed tests were done in these countries via speedtest.net to get information like download speeds, upload speeds and latency.

To find out how the networks in these countries meet today’s online demands, they were tested against the internet applications like photo sharing, video conferencing, YouTube videos and standard definition BBC iPlayer videos. The study showed that users in 39 countries received broadband quality good enough to access these popular applications of today.

However, only nine countries out of 66 were found to be fit for future needs such as viewing high definition video. This list includes some East European nations like Sweden, Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania and Netherlands while Japan and Korea in Asia Pacific region continue to top among the super-fast broadband nations.

Nations that can meet future needs Nations comfortable for today’s needs Nations that can just meet today’s needs
South Korea Switzerland Iceland
Japan Czech Republic Estonia
Sweden Norway Greece
Lithuania United States Singapore
Bulgaria Slovakia Canada
Lativia Portugal UK
Netherlands Finland Australia
Romania France Spain
Denmark Germany Poland
Hungary New zealand
Russia Ukraine
Belgium Turkey
Slovenia Ireland
Taiwan Italy
Austria
Hong Kong

Source: Said Business School and University of Oviedo

UK broadband, although placed in 25th position in the league table, is all set to improve in terms of general broadband quality and speeds, according to Joanne Hughes, Cisco’s communication manager. Nation-wide fibre optic broadband roll out by Virgin Media cable broadband and Digital Britain’s commitment to next generation broadband deployment could be the driving forces, she suggested.

The BBC News reports her as saying:

“We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focusing on next generation access,”