A recently released survey indicates Japan has the best quality broadband Internet services, with Sweden and the Netherlands completing the top three.  Researchers used download/upload speeds, and internet latency when compiling numbers from eight million tests completed in May 2008.

Sweden and the Netherlands were able to be the top European broadband nations because of their efforts in "increasing investments in fiber and cable network upgrades, coupled with competition diversity, and supported by strong government vision and policy."

Even though it's difficult to define quality internet, regardless of how questions were reworded, Oxford University Said Business School researchers found Japan remained on top of 41 other nations in the "Broadband Quality Score."  Latvia, Korea, Switzerland, Lithuania, Denmark, Germany and Slovenia are the nations that round out the top ten quality broadband nations, according to researchers.

Oxford University received assistance with the survey from Oviedo University and Cisco Systems.  The participating partners used collected broadband speed tests when users measured their broadband connections on Speedtest.net.

Upload speed has become increasingly important as many users want to send out data. Japan is the nation best suited for an increase in uploads, while other nations in the top ten continue to try and catch up.  Furthermore, there wasn't a correlation found between consumer internet prices and national performance, or how widespread broadband use is in a nation, a researcher from Cisco said.

Surprisingly, the United Kingdom joined Italy and Spain as European nations with underwhelming broadband for use in the Web 2.0 world.  Average download speeds obviously is good for browsing the internet, checking e-mail and watching videos on YouTube, but interactive applications and other new services require better Internet connections.  

The United States is ranked 16th overall.