Akamai have released the latest version of their "State of the Internet" report which covers the first quarter of 2011. It looks at various metrics including penetration, geography, and type of connectivity to produce a 'status' of the Internet within countries around the world. Various companies now provide such data, and Akamai's version looks into the technical aspects in a little more depth.
Akamai observed over 584 million unique IP addresses, 5.2% more than in the fourth quarter of 2010 and 20% higher than the first quarter of 2009. The number of IP addresses obfuscates the number of unique users as it is quite common for home networks to have multiple users and computers, whilst corporates and mobile networks tend to place many users behind one IP using NAT. They estimate that there are over one billion web users globally.
The company has taken a look at average global connection speeds (table below) which saw a near 10% increase compared with the last quarter- quite a contrast since speeds remained quite flat during Q4 2010. Four countries helped push this quite high with Ireland having a 16% change since the previous quarter. The global average speed is now 2.1Mbps.
| Country | Q1 Average (Mbps) | QoQ Change | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Korea | 14.4 | 5.0% | 20% |
| Hong Kong | 9.2 | -1.7% | 2.1% |
| Japan | 8.1 | -2.7% | 2.7% |
| Netherlands | 7.5 | 7.6% | 25% |
| Romania | 6.6 | -4.9% | 4.9% |
| Czech Republic | 6.5 | 14% | 19% |
| Latvia | 6.3 | 6.7% | 0.4% |
| Switzerland | 6.2 | 10% | 17% |
| Belgium | 6.1 | 11% | 29% |
| Ireland | 5.6 | 16% | 14% |
| Global | 2.1 | 9.7% | 23% |
Average measured connection speed by country
Over 110 countries recorded a year-on-year increase whilst nearly 100 saw this as a double digit increase. Unfortunately the UK doesn't make it to the top-10 of this table as we reached only 4.6Mbps in Akamai's average connection speed. The average peak connection speed was 17.2Mbps in the UK, and this is supposed to be a bette representation of Internet capacity. A look at average measured connection speeds in cities has not seen a repeat of Oxford ranking highly.
I think Akamai's figure is more useful than Ofcom's. Akamai is measuring actual traffic not just potential traffic.