Akamai's State-of-the-Internet

Nearly half (48) of top 100 fastest cities around the world in terms of Internet speeds are in Japan and 62% are in Asia, according to the latest "State of the Internet" from Akamai. Data from fourth quarter of 2009, as measured by Akamai, reveals the following patterns:

Eight of the top 10 countries saw quarterly increases in connection speeds. Eight of the top 10 also had higher average measured speeds at the end of 2009 than they did a year earlier.

South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan provided the highest average measured connection speed by country. These countries were the only three to surpass 7.5 Mbps average connection speed in the fourth quarter.

During the fourth quarter, 96 countries had average connection speeds below 1 Mbps, down from 103 countries in the prior quarter. Akamai measured average connection speeds below 100 Kbps in only three countries in the fourth quarter - less than half as many as in the third quarter.

The number of unique IP addresses connecting to the Akamai network increased 4.7 percent quarter over quarter to 465 million from 234 countries. This metric has grown 16 percent from the 401 million unique IP addresses observed at the end of 2008, and nearly 54 percent from the 312 million unique IP addresses observed at the end of 2007.

The United States and China continued to account for nearly 40 percent of the observed IP addresses.

During the fourth quarter of 2009, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 198 unique countries, down slightly from 207 unique countries in the third quarter. Russia remained the top attack traffic source, accounting for 13 percent of observed attack traffic in total.

Akamai has also begun tracking mobile broadband speeds and connectivity trends. The full report is available online.
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/http://