The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released their new report on broadband penetration, speed and price per Mbs, together with a composite score in different countries. In the top as you can see it is two Asian countries followed by the Nordic countries together with France. Why France is there I have no idea, but perhaps it thanks to their early implementation of Minitel.

However, even though Japan is number two and the country with the highest average speed this is not an accurate picture of the actual picture (according to me that is). While it is true that here in Japan many households have a very high theoretical speed, I have 100/30Mbs. However, since most servers are in either Europe or the US the internet* as a whole is not necessarily faster here. I will give you some examples. Game servers are fairly limited here in Japan and even including China, Korea and Taiwan the amount is not even comparable with Europe and North America, meaning that I can't always play a game or mod whenever I want. Servers in the US has an average ping of 150ms and servers in Europe has around 300ms. I had as a comparison pings of 30-80 while living in Europe being able to play more or less any game and mod at any time.

Downloading things from the internet is also often slower here since once again................the servers or users are mostly in Europe or in the States. For instance downloading through torrents usually don't exceed speeds of 200 KB/s. In Europe it wasn't uncommon for my to have speeds around 800-900 KB/s using a 8/1 Mbs connection. This was a couple of years ago.

Ergo, I would still prefer to live in Europe if internet was the only factor.

ps.
make sure you know the difference between bytes (B) and bits (b).

* the word internet here means all aspect of the internet; surfing, mail, downloading, games ect