The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American.
Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only two other countries make an appearance: China (with Hong Kong), and Sweden (with Umeå and Göteborg). Amazingly, only four countries have cities on this list.
It’s only when you continue past the top 50 that you find any US cities, the first being Boston at the 51st spot.
These numbers are from Akamai. The company just released its latest State of the Internet report, as usual filled to the brim with various Internet statistics. Akamai is a good source for connection speed data since it operates the world’s largest CDN (content delivery network).
Here is the top 50 list, taken right from the Akamai report.
So what about the rest? For your benefit, we also included spots 51-100, so you can see where the United States (finally) does make an appearance.
We’re Swedes, so of course we’re happy to see Sweden placed high on this list. (Go Sweden!)
