For those of us who are keen to find out more about the state of our parallel world, the Internet, Akamai Technologies has just delivered a comprehensive report. The State of the Internet study highlights data related to the connection speeds, attack traffic, networks characteristics such as connectivity, availability, latency problems.
All the data was collected through Akamai’s Intelligent Platform during the last quarter of 2011. Akamai’s platform allows an exquisite inside glance into broadband adoption across the globe. The report states that:
“the global average connection speed saw an unusual, and fairly significant, decline in the fourth quarter of 2011, dropping to 2.3 Mbps, as shown in Figure 8. It was reflected in declines in eight of the top 10 countries, as well as the United States. Globally, 93 countries/regions that qualified for inclusion saw average connection speeds decline.”
The most severe drop was noticed in Kuwait, where the average speed has declined by 31% compared to the previous quarter. At the top of the pecking order are South Korea and Japan, each showing off quarterly increases in the average connection speeds.
The South Korean users can enjoy average speed of 17.5 Mbps, while in Japan the average connection speed is 9.1 Mbps. If you are a fervid netizen, South Korean cities Taegu and Taejon are the places to be. These are the only two cities in the study with connection speeds over 20Mbps.
Less Attack Traffic
The report has a particular focus on security as it details the data regarding the attack traffic. Actually, Akamai representatives make it a point to underline that their Internet Visualization app allows users to scan threat traffic as it happens.
When it comes to the source of the attack traffic, Akamai team has noticed that threats come from 187 countries or regions. Still, this represents a slight decrease from the previous quarter, when 195 countries/regions were discovered as sources of attack traffic.
Worth noting that the very active leaders of Anonymous Romanian have been arrested recently. North and South America originated a little under 20% of the attack traffic. The remaining nearly 2% came from Africa.
Source – MD
