Denmark takes first place with 35.1 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, followed by Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland. Korea, Sweden, Luxembourg and Canada round out the top ten.
The UK trails in at number 11, France at number 13, and Italy at number 17, out of the 30 member countries in the OECD.
The total number of broadband subscriptions is up 18% compared to the year prior, which increased per-capita broadband penetration to 20% overall in December 2007, compared to 16.9% in December 2006.
The report also profiled the type of connections, showing that fibre-to-the-home is playing an increasingly important role. Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) subscriptions comprised 8% of all broadband connections in the OECD in December 2007.
"In terms of fibre the two most interesting markets are Japan and Korea. They are the only two countries where DSL is starting to fall as people switch from low-speed DSL to high-speed fibre," says Taylor Reynolds, an economist at the OECD.
The numbers for Japan and Korea are particularly impressive, with fibre connections accounting for 40% of all Japanese broadband subscriptions and 34% in Korea. From there it's a large jump to third place Sweden, which has 18% of broadband subscribers using fibre.
The surprise result in the OECD chart is the Slovak Republic, which comes fourth out of the eleven countries that have measureable FTTH penetration, with 16% of broadband subscriptions being fibre-based. In March 2007, Orange Slovensko, a subsidiary of France Telecom, announced that it would spend 1 billion SKK (€32 million) and cover almost 200,000 household by the end of the year.
The OECD's findings broadly reflect the numbers issued by the FTTH Councils in their global rankings earlier this year, although there are differences. It's worth pointing out, for instance, that the FTTH Councils count fibre connections per household, rather than per head of population.
"The way we typically get our data is from the regulator. The issue with the fibre data is that it is so small and so new that it is fluctuating in terms of [the regulators] honing their skills as data gatherers," Reynolds explains.