Bulgaria has overtaken South Korea as "the country with the highest broadband adoption rate at 96%," a report by world-leading cloud services provider Akamai shows.

In its 2014 State of the Internet report, Akamai tracks year-over-year changes, putting global high broadband adoption rate 25% up in the fourth quarter of 2014 compared to Q3 of the same year (the previous Q/Q increase was 22%).

"Bulgaria also saw adoption more than double, with a 180% year-over-year increase," a substantial boost just as in "all of the top- countries/regions". Romania jumped even further with 158%, while world leader South Korea registered an increase of just 11%, according to Akamai.

In Q4, Bulgaria just "edged out the third quarter's leader, South Korea, which saw a 0.1% fourth-quarter decline in its adoption rate" in terms of broadband (>4 Mbps) connectivity.

 

At the same time the country lags a little behind in terms of high broadband connectivity at a speed over 10 Mbps, ranking 9th.

Average Internet speed in Q4, according to Akamai's interactive map, was 11 Mbps, which is far beyond South Korea's 22 Mbps (even though the latter registered a slight decrease).

Bulgaria has traditionally ranked well in terms of Internet connection, but has performed much worse in penetration, since access remains limited in some rural regions, with only 20.3% of citizens being prepaid Internet users.