Akamai might not be a household name but between 15 to 30 percent of the world’s Web traffic is carried on the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company’sinternet platform at any given time. Using data gathered by softwareconstantly monitoring internet conditions via the company’s nearly 100,000 servers deployed in 72 countries and spanning most of the networks within the internet, Akamai creates its quarterly State of the internet report. The report provides some interesting facts and figures, such as regions with the slowest and fastest connection speeds, broadband adoption rates and the origins of attack traffic.
As in last year’s report, the top ten countries accounted for nearly 70 percent of the more than 584 million unique IP addresses connecting to the Akamai internet platform. Once again, the U.S. is way out in front with just over 142.6 million unique IP addresses, followed by China with just over 73.5 million and Japan with 41.2 million. Germany, France, South Korea, the U.K., Brazil, Italy and Spain round out the top ten, with Italy making its entry this quarter at the expense of Canada.
Fast, faster, fastest
Globally, average connection speeds are up 23 percent on last year to 2.1 Mbps. South Korea is out in front with an average connection speed of 14.4 Mbps, with Hong Kong (9.2), Japan (8.1), Netherlands (7.5) and Romania (6.6), rounding out the top five. The U.S. comes in at 14 with an average connection speed of 5.3 Mbps, which is a 14 percent increase on last year and a 4.7 percent increase on last quarter.
At the other end of the scale is Lebanon, where 61 percent of connections are below 256 kbps. This is compared to the global average of 3.3 percent and the U.S., where 2 percent of connections are