Picture taken from Pixabay

London, Aug. 8 (CNA) Taiwan has an average broadband speed of 34.4 megabits per second, the third fastest among 189 countries surveyed, according to Cable.co.uk, which released the results Tuesday.

Cable.co.uk said it carried out more than 63 million speed tests across the world in the 12 months leading up to May 10 this year and found that Singapore, Sweden and Taiwan had the fastest average broadband speeds, all above 30 Mbps, which is defined as superfast.

Singapore, at the top of the list, recorded an average speed of 55.13 Mbps, which means it would take approximately 18 minutes, 34 seconds to download 7.5 gigabytes of data -- about the size of a high-definition movie, the results showed.

Sweden was second with an average speed of 40.16 Mbps, meaning it would take around 25 mins, 30 secs to finish the same job.

In third place, Taiwan's average speed was 34.4 Mbps, which would allow a 7.5 gigabyte download in 29 mins, 46 secs, the survey found.

South Korea, which is usually among the top ranked countries in terms of average broadband speed, was ranked 16th with a mean download speed of 22.9 Mbps.

At the bottom of the rankings was Yemen, recording a mean download speed of 0.34 Mbps, which would take roughly 2 days to download 7.5 gigabytes of data.

Cable.co.uk, an advice service dedicated to delivering up-to-date information on United Kingdom broadband, TV, phone and mobile providers, reported that the UK was lagging behind Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries.

Ranked 31st, the UK has a mean download speed of 16.51 Mbps, which means it would take around 1 hour, 2 mins to download 7.5 gigabytes of data, the company said.

"These results offer us a fresh perspective on where we sit in the broadband world." said Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Cable.co.uk.

He said that the UK is continuing its rollout of superfast broadband, is meeting goals and undertaking new initiatives.

"However, clearly there are lessons to be learned both from Europe and from those topping the table," Howdle said.

Research group M-Lab which is a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, and Princeton University's PlanetLab, provided the data that was analyzed by Cable.co.uk. 

(By Tai Ya-chen and CNA intern William Yen) 
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