Have you ever wondered who has the fastest Internet the in world? A new report by Akamai details the top countries with the fastest Internet connection speeds.

For the past 4 years, the Internet content delivery network service, Akamai Technologies, has been releasing its State of the Internet report.  The findings detail the various countries that have the highest broadband capabilities as well as those that offer the slowest connection speeds to the Internet.

South Korea came out on top with both the highest average connection bandwidth to Internet users at 17.5 Mbps as well as the highest average peak bandwidth delivered to users at a staggering 47.9 Mbps. At that type of speed, you could download a movie in full high-definition quality in little over 30 minutes and download a regular mp3 file in less than 3 seconds.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Niger, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Cuba all came at the bottom with average connections speeds of under 300 kbps. At those speeds a high definition movie would take more than a full 24 hours to download.

Akamai places the United States at 13^th place in the world’s Internet connection speeds, with an average connection speed of 5.8 Mbps. The same movie in HD would take about 90 minutes to download.

According to the Akamai report, the top ten the countries with the highest average broadband connection speeds are:

1. South Korea
2. Japan
3. Hong Kong
4. The Netherlands
5. Latvia
6. Switzerland
7. Ireland
8. Czech Republic
9. Romania
10. Belgium

It’s interesting to note that there was an enormous difference between South Korea’s speeds as compared to the rest of the world. South Korea’s average broadband connection speed was 17.5 Mbps as noted before, but Japan’s speed comes in at 9.1 Mbps. That means that the average broadband Internet connection in South Korea is close to twice the bandwidth the second average connection. In percentages, South Korea is 92 percent faster than Japan and a whopping 201 percent faster than the United States.

This statistic doesn’t necessary mean that everyone has access to the country’s highest connection speeds.

The average connection speed of a few people misrepresents the actual experience of the majority. Here’s another list of the top ten countries sorted by the number of Internet users who have connections over 5Mbps.

1. South Korea
2. The Netherlands
3. Japan
4. Hong Kong
5. Belgium
6. Switzerland
7. Latvia
8. Romania
9. Czech Republic
10. Denmark

South Korea wins again with a staggering 83 percent of its Internet users connecting at speeds above 5 Mbps. This time however, the Netherlands (67 percent) beats Japan (60 percent). Hong Kong, Belgium, Switzerland, and Latvia each have more than 50 percent of their Internet users connecting at above 5 Mbps. The United States did better than 13^th place in this comparison. Akamai lists it at 12^th place, but it’s basically tied for tenth place with 44 percent of Internet users having connection speeds over 5 Mbps.