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According to a study into the quality of consumer broadband connections across 42 countries, many UK surfers will not be able to take advantage of next-generation web-based applications because their broadband connections are not fast or reliable enough.

The study, focusing on countries in Europe, North America, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), was conducted by a team of MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics, and sponsored by Cisco.

Over half of the 42 countries studied had a broadband infrastructure able to support common web applications, but nations including the UK, Spain and Italy on average fell below this threshold.

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and The Netherlands were found to have the best performing broadband connections in Europe, a result of increasing investments in fibre and cable network upgrades.

Unsurprisingly Japan, a nation that made an early commitment to investing in broadband, had by far the highest 'Broadband Quality score' of the 42 countries studied and was the only country currently prepared to deliver the quality required for next-generation web applications over the next three to five years.

"Average download speeds are adequate for web browsing, email and basic video downloading and streaming, but we are seeing more interactive applications, more user-generated content being uploaded and shared, and an increasing amount of high-quality video services becoming available," said Alastair Nicholson from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

"The broadband gap can no longer be seen as a penetration divide,"
added professor María Rosalía Vicente from University of Oviedo.

"It is also a quality and capacity divide, and therefore, a divide in the range of services people can access and use."

Using nearly eight million records from actual broadband speed tests conducted by users around the world during the month of May through Speedtest.net, the research team calculated statistical averages for each country of several key performance parameters used to determine the quality of a broadband connection.