bne -

Romania has the fastest internet download speeds of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe/Commonwealth of Independent States, with data transfers more than twice as fast as those in the US.

Internet company Ookla recently updated its global download ranking, which is based on millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net - a free and popular online tool that measures the speed a user can upload and download information to and from the internet.

"The value is the rolling mean throughput in Mbps [megabits per second] over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles," Speedtest.net says on its site.

The fastest internet connection in the world can be found in Hong Kong, with a rate of 71.01Mbps. However, Romania does astonishing well ranking third with a download speed of 51.4Mbps, just behind Singapore, which is in second place with 52.94Mbps.

Indeed, countries from Emerging Europe are scattered throughout the upper echelons of the table, presumably because most of the countries of the former Eastern bloc were forced to completely renovate their telecommunication systems in recent years and went for state-of-the-art, while Western Europe systems are a mix of the old and new.

The other regional high flyers in the global top 20 are: Lithuania (ranked 6th with 41.12Mbps), Latvia (12th, 37.41Mbps), Moldova (17th, 32.19Mbps), and Bulgaria (18th, 29.09Mbps).

All of these are ahead of much larger nations like the UK in 25th place with a speed of 23.62Mbps, only one place higher than the Czech Republic, which has the fastest internet of the countries in Central Europe at 23.62Mbps, putting it just head of Germany's 23.18Mbps.

Surprisingly, the US, which considers itself the inventor of the internet, scores badly, lying in 31st place with a speed of 20.77Mbps - less than half the speed that Romanians enjoy.

Ukraine comes in one slot behind the US with 20.76Mbps, but that puts it ahead of Russia at 34th with 20.08Mbps. (Clearly the range of speeds must vary widely, as when your correspondent tested his Russian connection the download speed was a mere 5Mbps).

At the other end of the scale, less surprisingly Afghanistan has the slowest internet speed out of the 186 ranked countries, with a speed of just 1.13Mbps. Uzbekistan is last in bne's region, where the internet is barely any faster, ranked at 170th with a speed of a mere 2.52Mbps.