Thanks to John Hamerlinck for the heads up on the latest broadband leaders – the Swiss! According to the Nielsen Company…

Switzerland has, by far, the fastest-connected population, with 88 percent of consumers online at home connecting at speeds greater than 2Mb – and 38% having a ‘super-fast’ 8Mb+ connection. Following Switzerland, the U.S. (29%) and Germany (27%) have the greatest concentration of people on ‘super-fast’ connections.

Nielson isn’t detailed on how they arrived at these numbers except that they measured and compared connection speeds during February 2011. That would indicate to me that they are looking at actual speeds, not advertised.

My favorite aspect of the article is their definitions of broadband:

• slow (up to 512Kb),
• medium (512Kb – 2Mb)
• fast (2Mb – 8Mb)
• super-fast (8Mb+)

Usually I hear about unserved, underserved and the served. In the US, served is confused by the dual standard of broadband (100 Mbps for most; 4 Mbps for the rest). Now I might lean on the scale a little so that 768 K was slow and 2 Mbps was medium and on down the line – but I really like idea of four qualifiers.