In what is being presented by some as a sign of terminal national decline, an outfit called Net Index* claims to have found the UK ranks at a very lowly 33rd in a global list of good places to use the Web.

According to this research, South Korea is the best place to be a broadband-hungry citizen, as it has average downstream speeds of 34Mbit/s. The UK comes in at an average 7.69Mbit/s, with the top locations for such speeds for consumer users being such possibly unlikely locations for digital natives as Loughton and Troon.

London fails to make the top 30 cities in the UK for internet speeds and overall, says the group, the UK has an average home upstream speed of 0.91Mbit/s, and a quality rating of just over 81%. Take some comfort from the fact that we are doing a wee bit better than Sudan – bottom in this poll at 153rd place and with speeds exactly 100th of our friends in the ROK.

Normally I’d have got the sackcloth and ashes out or shut myself away for a week, ashamed yet again of being British. Then I cheered myself up by remembering that only a few days before this announcement of terminal decline, I’d read a somewhat more positive analysis by an outfit called Point Topic which predicted dramatic domestic growth forecast for superfast broadband.

These number-crunchers found that the total number of UK broadband lines will be 25.1 million by the end of 2014 plus next-gen broadband, superfast broadband (generally defined as 50Mbit/s or above) will take off big-style – mainly based on fibre to the cabinet or premises (FTTx).

The firm says we (or rather, BT and its shareholders) can expect a boom similar to what happened with DSL broadband services in the mid-2000s – which went from zero to half a million subscribers in three years. Point Topic says we’ll get there in just two, driven by “much greater commitment by BT, a much more competitive market, much more experience of broadband rollout and a relatively mature technology”.

Put the two data together and we can see that we as a nation like the Internet but that we don’t possibly have it quite as fast as, well, highly urbanised Asian Tiger economies… and though I don’t have the figures to hand, I suspect South Korea has as much trouble getting really fast Net access to people in its mountainous areas we do.

Anyhow. A broad consensus is that the majority of UK users currently get between 3 to 4.5Mbit/s. Not great, no. But as it stands, that doesn’t seem to radically hold us back as a nation from doing what we as a nation want to do with the Internet at home (surf porn and hunt for cheap car insurance, broken up by hunting down old girlfriends on Facebook/a nice bout of illegal file-sharing).

Seriously, though – the UK is one of the most wired societies on the planet, as any provider of IT services to organisations with anyone under 30 in them (= 90%, surely) will know. We have as a result a very good business case for even more of this and now Brown’s 50p broadband tax is dead, it’ll get built by BT anyway (think ‘Infinity’).

But don’t worry about our national cyber virility. We are doing fine.

* Who is Net Index? It’s a new site from broadband testing group Ookla. If that doesn’t help illuminate you that much – as it didn’t us, to start with – Ookla is a ‘global leader in broadband speed testing and web-based network diagnostic applications’.