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Taiwan heads the list with 37 of the top 50 located in Europe and the UK sitting in 34th place.

A survey of 207 countries' broadband speed has revealed Taiwan as the fastest provider with average speeds of 85.03 megabytes per-second. In contrast Yemen, the slowest, recorded speeds of 0.38Mbps. The UK, was 34th fastest clocking up an average speed of 22.37Mbps.

The research was designed and compiled by Cable.co.uk, and the data gathered by M-Lab, an open source project with contributors from civil society organisations, educational institutions, and private sector companies. M-Lab is led by teams based at Code for Science and Society, New America's Open Technology Institute, Google, Princeton University's PlanetLab, and other supporting partners.

Last year, the five fastest countries had download speeds around 88 times faster than the five slowest. That gap is widening. This year the top five are 125 times faster than the five slowest. Taiwan tops the table at 85.02Mbps, compared to Yemen, which is 224 times slower at just 0.38Mbps.

Europe fared well with 37 of the top 50 fastest-performing countries are located in the continent, with ten in Asia & Pacific, two in North America, and just one in Africa. By contrast, 25 of the 50 slowest-performing countries are located in Africa, 12 in the Arab States with ten in Asia & Pacific, and three in South/Latin America

However, 141 countries failed to achieve average speeds above 10Mbps, a speed deemed by UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom to be the minimum required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business.