Akamai has just today announced the release of its 4th Quarter, 2009 State of the Internet report available for download at its web site. The report takes the experience of its 60,000 plus servers around the globe and looks into who it is that is connecting to them, from how many IP addresses in each country, at what speeds, and what kinds of malware they are pushing back at the servers.
Akamai once again examined the average measured connection speeds at a city level, this time filtering out particularly small cities so to qualify, a city has to have at least 50,000 unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai. Around half (48) of the top cities are in Japan, and 62 of them are in Asia. The 15 top cities which are in Europe are spread across six countries, and the US has 21 of these top cities and the report gives average connection times for each of the separate states in the US, with Delaware on top (again) with an average connection speed of 7.6 Mbps and most states averaging something like 4 Mbps or above.
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.
Also some 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% quarter over quarter. Ending 2009 at 465 million connected unique IPs from 234 countries.
For the seventh consecutive quarter, the United States and China continued to account for nearly 40 percent of the observed IP addresses, while there were 186 countries with fewer than one million unique IP addresses, 145 with fewer than 100,000 and 32 with fewer than 1,000 unique IP addresses.
Norway had the highest number of IP connections per head of population at 49% and 35 countries had Internet penetration levels of 25% or greater
Akamai for the first time examined mobile broadband connectivity and reports a wide range in average measured connection speeds, from 3.2 Mbps on an Austrian mobile provider, down to 106 Kbps on a mobile provider in Slovakia.
Of the 109 mobile providers analyzed in the report, more than 40 had average measured connection speeds of over 1 Mbps in the fourth quarter, and 11 over 2 Mbps.
Akamai pointed out that the largest amount of attack traffic still comes from Russia, at around 13% of the total, followed by the USA and China. Akamai delivers an incredible number of online transactions, and is the backbone network behind such services as Apple’s iTunes.