The UK has taken a disappointing 25th place in the latest global broadband study.
The country is considered to be meeting the needs of today with its broadband capability but it only held a mid-table spot behind Lithuania, Bulgaria and Latvia.
Sweden came out top for the European contenders but came fourth overall behind South Korea who took the top spot Japan and Chinese territory Hong Kong.
Almost two thirds of countries were able to deliver good enough broadband for the most common web applications today, such as social networking, streaming low-definition video, web communications and sharing small files such as photos and music.
However, only nine countries were prepared for future web applications such as high definition internet TV or high-quality video communications like home telepresence, which the report suggests will become mainstream in the next three to five years.
The research was undertaken by MBA students from the Sad Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics on behalf of Cisco and looked at 66 different countries' quality of connections and the percentage of households which have one.
Alastair Nicholson, associate fellow at the Sad Business School, said: "New web applications will continue to increase demand for improvements in the key performance parameters of download and upload throughput and latency that we use to calculate broadband quality."
Average download speeds globally increased by 49 per cent to 4.75 Mbps and upload speeds increased even further by 69 per cent to 1.3 Mbps.
