The Bulgarian capital Sofia is ranked tenth in the world on the quality of its Internet access, according to the second Broadband Quality Research Report.

The Report has been drafted by the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo, and sponsored by Cisco.

The Report gives Sofia 56 points out of a maximum of 100 in the ranking placing it along technologically advanced metropolises such as Seoul and Osaka. The Japanese city Yokohama has the best Internet access in the world with 85 points.

Bulgaria as a whole has been ranked 34th globally on the quality of its Internet access largely because the spread of broadband services around the country is still too low.

At the same time, however, Bulgaria is ranked third globally among the countries that have increased their Internet access quality in 2009 compared to the previous year. Only South Korea and Lithuania are ahead of Bulgaria on this criteria.

On the index measuring the quality of Internet services Bulgaria has 49 points, 14 points up from the 35 in 2008.

Bulgaria is also ranked among the nine countries (including South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands among others) out of a total of 66 countries where the quality of the Internet services is good enough to allow the use of all applications offered online.

The Pari Daily cites Yordan Popov, a managing director of Cisco Bulgaria as saying that the tough competition between cable, LAN and ADSL providers in the bigger cities had led to a very high quality of the broadband Internet in those places. At the same time, much of Bulgaria’s countryside appears to be lagging behind.

The Broadband Quality Research Report shows that 62 of the total of 66 countries studied have improved the quality of their broadband services compared to the situation in 2008. Overall, South Korea is number one in the ranking, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, and Sweden.