** Our most recent update for 2014 can be seen here **

One of our more commented on posts included a table showing how the countries of the world ranked according to fastest Internet speeds. This report is published by Akamai every quarter and the findings taken from data gathered across Akamai’s global server network. In our previous post, data from Q3 2009 had been reviewed so we felt it was time to get an updated report.

Attack traffic

The stats for attack traffic include denial of service attacks and the report highlights one customer that had a peak request rate of over 9,000x normal levels. Last year’s fourth quarter was reported to return a lower concentration of attack traffic compared to the third. It will be interesting to see what the figures are like for the first half of 2011 as there appears to be a higher number of both DOS and compromised security hacks, although it could just be the profile of the companies being targeted.

Key changes within the Originating Countries table for Attack Traffic were Russian moving to the top of the table for originating countries with 10% of attack traffic, while the United States dropped to fifth place with 7.3%.

Global Mobile Connectivity

Although not included in the previous post, we thought this was worthwhile including here given the growth in Mobile Connectivity.

The highest average connection speed was from a mobile provider in Greece, at just over 4.5 Mbps. The speeds on known mobile providers around the world ranged from this high down to 134Kbps.

The highest average peak connection speed was from a UK mobile provider, at nearly 21.2 Mbps while the global lowest was barely more than 1Mbps.

Content consumption grew quarter-over-quarter for 62 of Akamai’s listed providers, with 89 providers experiencing increased content consumption compared to the previous year’s final quarter.

Connection Speeds

So without further ado, here’s the updated tables for Q4 2010 showing internet speeds by Country!

Akamai measure in two ways:

Average Connection Speed

Average Peak Connection Speed – this is more representative of the capacity of the Internet connection as it is an average of the maximum measured connection speeds

In the report, the first tables are ordered by country but in later papers Akamai details cities. Akamai reported that there was significant growth in some countries e.g. Belgium grew by 14% and while some countries saw declines these weren’t by significant values. It is worth noting that all of the countries within the top ten, and including the United States are recorded as maintaining an average connection speed higher than the “high broadband” threshold of 5Mbps. Other countries are not as fortunate and Mayotte is Akamai’s slowest country, with an average connection speed of 54 Kbps.

How fast are you?

Why not check out your current connection speed and let us know how fast you are. To get the ball rolling, here’s a test from our office location using the free tool from http://www.speedtest.net/