Just twenty-five years ago, Romanians under the dictatorship of Nicolae “The Genius of the Carpathians” Ceaușescu didn’t have to worry about the Internet. The country was plagued by electricity outages and economic austerity imposed to pay off the Romania’s foreign debt.

After the National Salvation Front dispatched Ceaușescu and his wife (and Communism) in a hailstorm of revolutionary bullets on Christmas Day 1989, Romania’s Euro-Atlantic integration began. Romania’s ancient eastern bloc telephone system was unsuitable for dial-up, much less broadband, so it was largely scrapped in favor of fiber optics in an effort to bring the country up to date with current technology.

Today, 97 percent of Romania is wired with fiber optic broadband. Some goes straight to the home, other providers rely on a form of Ethernet broadband, while fiber to the neighborhood networks predominate in smaller cities.

It is much the same story across the rest of eastern Europe, which has allowed those nations to leapfrog ahead of the United States in broadband speed rankings.

What also sets Romania apart from many other countries is the low price charged for high-speed Internet access. Broadband service at reasonably fast speeds can be obtained for as little as $10 a month.

The top 20 fastest Internet speeds according to average peak connection:

1. Hong Kong, 65.4Mbps
2. South Korea, 63.6Mbps
3. Japan, 52Mbps
4. Singapore, 50.1Mbps
5. Israel, 47.7Mbps
6. Romania, 45.4Mbps
7. Latvia, 43.1Mbps
8. Taiwan, 42.7Mbps
9. Netherlands, 39.6Mbps
10. Belgium, 38.5Mbps
11. Switzerland, 38.4Mbps
12. Bulgaria, 37Mbps
13. United States, 37Mbps
14. Kuwait, 36.4Mbps
15. United Arab Emirates, 36Mbps
16. Britain, 35.7Mbps
17. Canada, 34.8Mbps
18. Czech Republic, 34.8Mbps
19. Macau, 34.4Mbps
20. Sweden, 33.1Mbps

Source: Akamai