Akamai reports that average global connection speeds rose 5 percent to 2.9 Mbps in Q4 2012. That may not seem like much, but many countries in Africa and Southeast Asia are still seeing average speeds of 500-800 Kbps. Those countries are only seeing less than one percent increase in speeds each quarter, but recent initiatives may help bring them up to speed sooner rather than later.

On a country-by-country basis, South Korea is still king with an average speed of 14 Mbps. Japan is second with 10.8 Mbps and Hong Kong is in third with 10.8 Mbps. The United States was ranked in eighth place with an average speed of 7.4 Mbps.

Every country in the top 10, except for South Korea, saw average broadband speeds increase. Japan saw a year-over-year increase of 19 percent, Hong Kong saw a year-over-year increase of 5.4 percent, and the U.S. saw a year-over-year increase of 28 percent.

The top 10 positions are largely the same when it comes to countries with high broadband (speeds over 10Mbps) connections. South Korea is in first place with 49 percent of the country with high broadband internet followed by Japan and Hong Kong with 39 percent and 28 percent respectively. The United States is in eighth place again with only 19 percent of the country having high broadband.

When looking specifically at the United States, the Northeast largely remains the place to be if you want consistently high Internet speeds. Vermont takes the number one spot with average speeds of 10.8 Mbps followed by Delaware and the District of Columbia with 10.6 Mbps and 10.2 Mbps respectively.

It’s largely the same when looking at the states with the highest amount of the population with access to high broadband. In this case, New Hampshire comes in at the top spot with 34 percent of its residents having access to speeds higher than 10 Mbps followed by the District of Columbia and New Jersey with both at 33 percent.

As for Internet penetration, Akamai says that nearly 700 million unique IPv4 addresses connected to its platform in the last quarter. That’s a 4.2 percent jump from Q3 2012 and a 13 percent jump from Q4 2011. With a single IP address potentially representing numerous users, Akamai estimates that there are over one billion unique Web users on the Internet today.

It should be noted that not every Internet user connects to Akamai, but a great deal of them do. Akamai’s numbers are about the closest we’ll get to the actual number of people who are now connected to the Internet.

On a final note, Akamai says that global attack traffic (i.e. DDoS attacks) increased by 200 percent in 2012. Unsurprisingly, 41 percent of that attack traffic originated from China in Q4 with the United States coming in second with 10 percent of all attack traffic.

Despite the worrying increases in attack traffic over the last year, Akamai’s report is incredibly encouraging. We like to complain about our ISPs, and for good reason, but these reports always help to put things into perspective. Our Internet speeds are slowly rising, and they’re rising faster than in other parts of the world. With the spread of Google Fiber and Gigabit Squared, we might start to see the U.S. rise up the ranks in forthcoming quarterly reports.

You can get a copy of Akamai’s State of the Internet Report here. If you don’t want to read 45 pages of analysis and charts, you can read the two-page executive summary here.

Once again, we have a front row seat to the changes occurring to the Internet thanks to Akamai’s State of the Internet report that covers Q2. The previous Q1 report found that the Internet was slowly getting faster around the world. How is Q2 shaping up? Things are still slowly getting faster, but individual countries are seeing declines.

In Q2 2012, the average internet speed around the world was 3 Mbps. That’s a quarter-over-quarter increase of 13 percent. Even better, it’s a year-over-year increase of 15 percent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look that good for the top ten countries around the world. South Korea, bastion of fast Internet, actually saw a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 9.8 percent to 14.2 Mbps. The United States is in 9th place with an average of 6.6 Mbps which is a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 1.4 percent.

In worrying news, global broadband speeds are down this quarter. Akamai defines high broadband as connections over 10 Mbps and this bracket saw a sizable decline. Globally, the percentage of Internet users with high broadband is at 10 percent which is a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 1.6 percent. Getting into individual countries, 49 percent of South Korea has high broadband which is a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 7.4 percent. The United States pulls in at 7th place with 16 percent of the population using high broadband which is a quarter-over-quarter increase of 5.5 percent.

Things look a little better as we head into general broadband territory which is defined by speeds faster than 4 Mbps. The global average is at 39 percent which is a quarter-over-quarter decline of 2.8 percent. South Korea is once again at the top with 84 percent of its citizens at broadband speeds which is a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 2.2 percent. The United States is not even in the top 10 this time as it pulls in at 13th place with 57 percent of the population at broadband speeds. This is a quarter-over-quarter decline of 4.6 percent.

Moving on to the United States, New England is still dominant force in the country when it comes to fast Internet speeds. The top 10 average Internet speeds mostly belong to Northeastern states with New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut belonging to the top 10. The fastest average Internet in the U.S., however, belongs to Delaware with average speeds of 12.1 Mbps which is a quarter-over-quarter increase of 18 percent.

The breakdown is largely the same when it comes to the percentage of citizens who are on high broadband connections. Delaware is still number one with 39 percent of its citizens enjoying high broadband, which is a quarter-over-quarter increase of 19 percent. Unlike the average speeds, however, most of the states with the highest percentages of high broadband users belong on the east coast. Washington state is the only West Coast state that features a high percentage of citizens on high broadband.

General broadband availability is still mostly present in the Northeastern states, but there’s one surprise here. Florida pulled in at 10th place with 69 percent of its citizens using regular broadband. That’s an quarter-over-quarter increase of 2.7 percent.

Beyond Internet speeds, Akamai also took time out this quarter to look at the increasing adoption rates of IPv6. IPv6 was made available to everyone on June 6, and since then IPv6 growth has been at seven percent in 2012. Akamai points out that this is actually lower than the growth rates from the past three years. One possible reason is that most large organizations and networks had already switched to IPv6 in the years leading up to the official rollout.

As for the rest of the report, you can request a copy here. It breaks down Internet penetration rates for other geographic regions including the explosive Internet regions in Asia that are just starting to make a presence on the Internet. You can also check out the latest cyber threats and where they’re coming from.

Akamai, a cloud platform enterprise that keeps a close eye on these things, released its Fourth Quarter, 2011 State of the Internet report today, announcing that South Korea has both the highest average connection speed and highest average peak connection speed. In fact, even if you don’t mind to settle for an internet speed slightly slower than the best, 69 of the top 100 fastest internet cities are in the Asia Pacific – and 61 one of them are in Japan (!!!). As you can see in the table from Akamai’s interact data map illustrating the findings from the report, South Korea is topping out at over 17Mbps.

Part of the reason that South Korea’s internet is dusting the rest of the world is because it’s also the highest ranked country in high broadband adoption, with 83% of the country’s internet connections above 5Mbps. Just for larfs, here’s a comparison of South Korea with the country I live, the United States.

The United States, as it were, has a 43% adoption rate to high broadband connections. Given I don’t really feel like I have to wait around all that long to load a webpage or even stream a movie from Netflix over my DSL line, I can only imagine how corpse-fast South Koreans would think the internet here is in my neck of the woods.

Given that South Korea’s internet is so much faster, one imagines that they spend a lot less time waiting for pages to load (or download files in general), so therefore they should have a lot more extra time. Anybody wanna speculate on what they must do with all that extra time? (I’m wagering that they just use more internet with that time.)

[Via CNET.)

The majority of video content on NFL.com will be offered in higher quality across the Akamai HD Network, including NFL.com Live: Thursday Night Football, video highlights of every NFL game and coverage of other NFL events.

In addition, exclusive video within the new NFL Fantasy Football game will be offered in higher quality through Akamai’s HD Network.  The improved content will be made available in multiple bitrates up to 3.2 mbps.

"We think HD quality video will have the same impact online as it has on television," said Hans Schroeder, NFL vice president of media strategy and development.  

"Our multi-year partnership with Akamai will help us deliver the highest quality NFL video experience to our fans."

"The goal of the Open Video Player for HTML5  <video> is to provide a foundation to allow customers to quickly implement world-class solutions for cross platform/device/format video applications, providing their users with a consistent, high-quality experience through Akamai’s rich media management, delivery and measurement solutions," a spokesperson for Akamai tells WebProNews.

Akamai explains why this is important to the industry: "The iPhone is unique because it has rapidly become ubiquitous and the iPad is quickly following, with more than 2 million devices already sold. Akamai is working with many of our content owner and broadcasting customers on mobile delivery models. They are finding that when offering live or on-demand content they can quickly expand their available viewership by tens of thousands of global viewers by efficiently and seamlessly developing video experiences designed for these devices."

"With adaptive bitrate video technology that automatically adjust video quality levels based on a user’s connection speed (wifi, 3G, Edge) consistent security and analytics – all part of Akamai’s HD Network – content owners can deliver the highest possible quality video experiences – even 24×7 TV channels – on the portable devices," Akamai continues. "This toolkit will make it easier for them to create these experiences for the iPad and iPhone and better service their audiences through a portable, ‘best possible screen’ viewing approach."

The player provides a code library supporting industry best practices and standards such as CSS, JavaScript, HTML/HTML5 and Yahoo! Media RSS 2.0. Akamai says that this means customers can dramatically reduce the time it takes to create an HTML5 <video> based experience to support Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch), as well as other browsers/devices supporting HTML5 <video>.

The toolkit can be found here.

Akamai, which deals in content delivery networks, is the organization that might be in Google’s good graces.  Some investors have accepted the idea to the point that they’ve sent Akamai’s stock up 3.38 percent so far today.

That’s not an inconsiderable amount, and there are some potential synergies between Google and Akamai.  Akamai is a believer in cloud computing, for one thing (which could tie to Google Apps), and it’s also interested in delivering HD video (which could benefit YouTube).

Doubters might want to consider what Eric Schmidt said 20 days ago regarding once-per-month acquisitions, as well.  If he intends to stick to that estimate, the clock is sort of ticking.

However, it’s far from certain that a takeover will occur.  Eric Savitz and Dan Rayburn don’t think it’ll go through.  Fil Zucchi added that he’s heard a lot of Akamai acquisition rumors before.  We’ll see what happens, then.

The top 10 portals saw about 90 percent of the attack traffic, with more than two-thirds of the traffic likely related to the Conficker worm.

In the first quarter, one-fifth of the Internet connections around the globe were at speeds higher than 5Mbps, a 5 percent increase from the prior quarter, and nearly a 30 percent increase over the same period last year. Worldwide, the average connection speed increased by about 11 percent, growing to 1.7 Mbps, and more than 120 countries had connection speeds under Mbps.

From a global connection speed perspective, Japan surpassed South Korea for the highest levels of broadband connectivity, though South Korea maintained the highest average connection speed, at 11 Mbps.

For the first time since publishing the State of the Internet report in the first quarter of 2008, South Korea no longer had the largest percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds above 5Mbps, with a 25 percent decline. The first place spot was taken by Japan, with 57 percent of connections to Akamai at high-speed broadband levels.

Continuing a trend started in 2008, the East Coast of the United States continued to lead the country in the greatest level of broadband connectivity, with 8 of the top 10 states on the list.

Delaware maintained its top 10 position, with 62 percent of connections at 5Mbps or greater, and the highest average connection speed in the United States, at 7.2 Mbps. Maine has nearly quadrupled its percentage of high speed broadband connection to Akamai since the first quarter of 2008.

As the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming over the Akamai network, the company reported it reached a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority live streams) at around 12:15 p.m. today.

Total traffic on the network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second and the company also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time.

"In addition to the historic nature of the Inauguration, it is now clear that this event has driven unprecedented demand from a global online audience," said Robert Hughes, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services, and Marketing at Akamai.

"With the Inauguration occurring during work-day hours in the U.S., we witnessed record numbers of live streams served in support of many leading news businesses. While this event was supported flawlessly for our broadcast customers, it is also important to point out that Akamai continued to deliver perfect quality of service for the remainder of our 2,800 enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world."

Akamai said its Net Usage Index for News also saw a significant traffic peak today. The index indicated that at about 11:45 a.m. there were over 5.4 million visitors per minute looking for news online.
 

The Internet logged 8,572,042 visitors per minute as of 11:00 PM Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the moment Obama was declared the winner. The previous peak, 7,283,584 visitors per minute, had been held since June 22, 2006, win the US lost to Ghana in the World Cup.

Luckily for those Internet consumers, the behind-the-scenes heroes of IT were prepared for the onrush. Hosting companies increased new hardware and load-balancing services, while political sites like DailyKos beefed up their backend in advance.

Looks like it worked because, aside from Cogent’s little spat with Spint (wonder how much that affected political traffic?), the Internet was thriving under one heckuva traffic test.

The Google Blog put together a nice list of what all those people were looking for in advance of heading to the polls. Interesting to see Chuck Norris take his place between Joe Biden and Cindy McCain. Also interesting was to see a large number of people boning up on the tenets of socialism, perhaps to measure official definitions against the Republican definition.

Here are a few of those top ten search gainers from yesterday:

Top Political Personas
Obama
Palin
McCain
Tina Fey
Joe Biden
Chuck Norris
Cindy McCain
Bristol Palin
SNL Palin
Colin Powell

Top Political Topics
debate
Social Security
presidential debate
polls
voter registration
gas prices
oil prices
FDIC
electoral college
Socialism

Top Political News Sources
Drudge
Huffington Post
Gallup
Real Clear Politics
Rasmussen
Rush Limbaugh
Politico
538
CNN Politics
Daily Kos

In its position as a premier content delivery service, Akamai holds a perspective on Internet traffic, both good and malicious, that few others can match. The firm plans to share some of its observations through a new report.

An initial summary from Akamai for the first three months revealed how malicious attacks originated in 125 countries around the world. China and the United States represented the top two countries where attacks began.

The two nations accounted for roughly 30 percent of the origination of attacks during those three months. Many attacks focused on 23 unique ports, with attempts to deliver a host of malware through them.

Microsoft’s Remote Procedure Call port 135 saw the most attacks hitting it, with nearly 30 percent of attacks trying to break into systems that way. Another 13 percent tried to tag NetBIOS through port 139.

Akamai also looked at connection speeds for Internet users around the globe. South Korea topped the list of countries with 5Mbps or greater connections, with 64 percent having those. The United States, with its concentration of broadband in the hands of a few multi-billion dollar telcos, comes in at a miserable seventh place with 20 percent, behind Belgium’s 21 percent, embarrassingly enough.

Even Romania has more high-speed connections as a percentage of population than the country that invented the Internet in the first place. At least the US managed to stay ahead of Nepal, albeit not by very much.