A league table comparing broadband value across a range of countries has ranked the UK in lowly 24th place, reports IT Pro News.

According to the business IT news service, the Point Topic quarterly table ranks countries based upon the average price paid by consumers and businesses for a megabit of bandwidth. The UK appears to offer particularly poor value for broadband services, coming far behind Hong Kong (1st), Japan (2nd) and even Romania (3rd).

Point Topic's report suggests that this might be due to the lack of offerings for fibre broadband, raising the possibility for value in the UK to improve if operators follow through on plans to upgrade their networks.

"Nine of the ten best value tariffs are either pure fibre or hybrid offerings where fibre is a significant part of the local loop," said Fiona Vanier, senior analyst for Point Topic.

UK lagging behind other nations for broadband speed

The report follows research from Akamai, published earlier this year, which showed the UK lagged behind other nations when it came to broadband speeds. This seems to corroborate Ms Vanier's claim that "higher speeds generally mean better value for the consumer," as the UK was comparably low in the rankings for speed as it is for value: 27th out of 201 countries.

The Akamai report suggested that the average speed of broadband in the UK is just 3.8mbps, significantly lower than the official Ofcom estimate of 5.2mbps. Furthermore, no city in the UK managed to break into the top 100 cities for broadband speeds - instead, Japan dominated with a staggering 53 cities, followed by South Korea with 11. Other problems revealed by the report included a lack of growth in internet penetration in the UK for the first quarter of 2010, a situation shared only by Germany.