These are the countries with the fastest broadband

President Obama is delivering his sixth State of the Union address on Tuesday, and there's lots of speculation about what he's going to cover. 

One thing that we know for sure will be on the agenda? Affordable high-speed internet access.

"Today, high-speed broadband is not a luxury, it's a necessity," Obama said while addressing a crowd in Cedar Falls, Iowa, last week. 

He's right: The UN even declared internet access a human right back in 2011. According to a 2014 study released by McKinsey & Co., 4.4 billion people on Earth still do not have internet access — 50 million of them in the US. 

But it's not just access that's important — speed is also crucial. According to a report recently released by Akamai, a cloud computing company, the US is improving but still lags behind other countries in broadband speeds. In the United States, the average download speed is 11.5 Mbps (megabits per second), according to the report, which doesn't even land it among the top 10 countries.

So why is the internet so slow in the US? It has a thing or two to do with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which fostered a market with limited competition and few incentives to improve internet infrastructure. (Think about that the next time you're on hold with Comcast.) Here's an entertaining review of the problem from