The launch of super high-speed DOCSIS 3.0 cable broadband technology, the increased deployment of fiber and faster DSL lines resulted in a sharp increase in the average speed of broadband connections during the fourth quarter of 2008, according to data collected by Akamai (s akam) for its “State of the Internet” report, expected to be released on Monday. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company that runs the world’s largest content delivery network compiles data pertaining to many different aspects of the Internet.
According to Akamai data, the average global broadband speed in the last three months of 2008 was 1.5 Mbps, though South Korea had an average speed of 15 Mbps. The U.S. came in at No. 17 with an average speed of 3.9 Mbps, though I’m sure that’s going to change in coming years with the wide-scale adoption of DOCSIS 3.0-based broadband from Comcast (s cmcsa) and fiber offerings such as Verizon FiOS (s vz).
Among U.S. states, Delaware ranked the highest with an average speed of 7.28 Mbps, while New York came in at No. 4 with 5.37 Mbps. California, with an average speed of 4.36 Mbps, took the No. 15 spot, while Alaska was the slowest state in the U.S., with 2 Mbps. The data collected by Akamai shows that thanks to Verizon FiOS and increased competition between the cable and phone companies, broadband speeds were faster on the East Coast of the U.S. than the rest of the country. Maine, Florida and Vermont showed high triple-digits gains in broadband connectivity during the fourth quarter 2008 over the same period the year before.
One astounding part of the report was the continuing and relentless growth of the Internet and the number of devices that are connected to it, as demonstrated by the number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai’s global network.
At 400 million, that figure was up almost 6 percent from the third quarter 2008 and 28 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2007. Similar to the prior two quarters, nearly 30 percent of those IP addresses came from the U.S. and 10 percent came from China.
Among some of the interesting factoids from around the world was data showing that in India, the average speed was 772 Kbps, with just 0.6 percent of broadband connections faster than 5 Mbps. In China, too, only about 0.6 percent of broadband connections are faster than 5 Mbps; the average speed there was 833 Kbps. Sweden had the fastest broadband in Europe, with an average speed of 5.6 Mbps.
The information is very valuable, but i want to add that in India condition of internet is more than a worse, even Reliance is giving a very poor service to his costumers in NCR region, i was messed by the speed , i got 10-20kbps browsing in a 75kbps connection ,and sometimes i was unable to open google.com, cosutumer care are very unresponsive, everything is so slow here and we are dreaming of becoming developed nation,how could it be possible??
Reliance has a terrible track record – what else can you expect from a bunch of lala 😉
But seriously I think the issue is of cabling and how old the copper infrastructure is in India. I am betting you guys get WiMAX-based broadband option soon enough which will be faster.
what else can you expect from a bunch of lala 😉 ……….hahahahhahahahahahahha
Good one OM !!
Btw Airtel is also lala company …mittal …but somewhat better than reliance ……….But I also face the same issue of google being slow to open on airtel ……..I used 100 mbps link Singapore it was just amazing …..pity we dont have anything that close in india …….why cant some company invest in fiber here …..as its fastest growing telecom and broadband base ….maybe govt should invest give subsidize internet infrastructure here
but here the issue is not of copper cabling because they are providing connection through optical fibre. this is overall the system faults. and how can we expect the WiMAX based broadband because 3G is yet not stable .
A 75Kbps (kilobits) downstream connection would give you a theoretical maximum of 9.3KB/s (kilobytes).
I’m not necessarily doubting what you say but if you *are* getting the units mixed up, there’s your explanation.
You know I had never experienced such speeds as 15Mbps. I can’t even imagine how the experience might be to use even 2Mbps.
I am from India. Yours statistics are right. I never got to more than 300kbps speed.
Governments in all countries should take care of providing broadband, it is such an important utility for encouraging innovation and prosperity. If they leave it to the telcos it will never get done. We need fibre to the homes, it is cheaper and better than copper and intervention would make it happen.
That arrogant company should get their network together so everybody can actually get max. speeds on it before telling the world what the global state of broadband is. Apart from the amount of unique IP addresses, this data can hardly be taken serious. The top 10 of amount of connections that are 2 mbit/s or faster looks completely ridiculous anyway. But I’m glad to know that they have better internet in Tunisia, Monaco and Slovakia than many other countries like the Scandinavian ones.
They’ll know that everybody from bloggers to newssites blindly copies their reports everytime they release one though so it’s not hard to understand why they don’t give a hoot. What a joke.
Man you cant be serious,, when talking about Akamai, you do know this data provieds a very large understanding of How, when and why, Internet performs better or suffers drastically because of which many MNC’s try to make thing better from their end or they go to Akamai, and i guess once you start handling 25% of worlds internet traffic you earn a little right to be Arrogant hahaha 🙂 Well you wont understand that but still, its only a fool who can take knowledge as arrogance,, if you combine the matirx of Limelight , Level 3, CDNetworks, they dont come even near the the number what Akamai shows so i would say stop blogging like a fool and start reading more. take care man, Hope your employers are happy with you 🙂
Hey Im from Pakistan and I’m on 512 Kbps atm. We have upto 2 Mbps speed for 3600 – 5000 PKR. Speed is awesome and I’m getting the full 62.4 kbps downloading speed. Hopefully, I’ll be switching to 2 Mbps connection next month. 🙂
Curious how this can possibly be accurate for the *entire* Internet. Akamai delivers only about 25% of Internet traffic, for a certain subset of customers that are skewed towards the enterprise. What about the other 75% of traffic – how can they know what’s going on in Limelight or Level3 or CDNetworks networks, or on the public Internet at large? How can they comment on *overall* trends when their observations are limited to the segment concentrations of their customers?
Besides, didn’t Akamai say traffic growth was slowing just a few months ago? (http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/7/akamai-q2-earnings-analysis)
This is nothing more than a PR stunt with some nice shiny graphs.
Hey paul good to know that you havent graduated yet,, cos if you would i dont think your reading would be so poor,, Akamai no where says its the entire internet report,, it clearly states the Akamai global report,, well i wont waste my time to make you understand the meaning of it 🙂 and akamai delivers 25% of internet traffic, but its way higher than all the clowns in the business who tried to Mock Akamai’s Business plan,, thats why most of the companies went out the business when the internet bubble burst. I guess todays class is over for you son any doubts Reply to this let see how talented you are :P.
Wow, Viva la Japan@!
I am Kamran from Karachi, Pakistan.Here we got 1Mbps speed for just 600 per month.Our Cable system is awesome.
Usual download speed is 200K
The only company with halfway decent broadband in India is BSNL. Between 2004 and 2007 (when I was in India) I got consistently good service from BSNL on a DSL line.
Although slow to begin with (312 kbps), they changed to a 256k/2 MB shared line in ’05 that was pretty decent between 10pm and 5 am when everyone was asleep.
Guys,
Network switches & systems go up gigabits speed this days, so why the hell are will still dwelling around kps – 2/12/15mbps ???
Can those responsible get this nonsense sorted out!!
Donkey
Dude actually the cost of establishing a giga bit speed internet connection is way too high and people in underdeveloped and developing cannot afford it. Its pointless for them it they establish an ISP for giga bits and do not find anyone interested in getting it at such high rates. Heck it will cost the general public way higher than minimum wage rate in the country.
These numbers are completely ridiculous.
I’m from Tunisia and I’ve never experienced such speeds. The best we can have is 1,5 Mb (in theory) for the public.
Add the fact that all internet connections pass trough a central agency (managed by the government like Iran), you can easely understand the state of internet connections are like 10 years ago in Europe
Right on ya Anis,
it’s a fiction that is hard to believe, the connections above 2Mb are rare ( i think 12% of all the “linked” folk)
add to that the ATI ,our Big Brother but still the rising rate of the subscribers is getting “high” that’s a fact,
we got a long path to walk (chill out haters :P).