It’s crazy to think that back when we founded Dyn in 2001, broadband connections were primarily used at work and college campus while just rapidly getting adopted in households in the United States. Today, with connectivity using smartphones, it’s a completely different story.

A large collection of old AOL Free Trial CDs (photo: Vice).

The Internet is a fundamental communications, global communications platform that we all use for content and business applications.

With our huge vantage point sitting ontop of 150 billion points of data a day, we have a unique insight into Internet performance. Using this data, a little research, and the help of Dyn’s research team, let’s look at some Internet stats to frame how you’re planning to maximize your performance in 2016.

1. China still has the most internet users in the world.

Not surprising, the world’s most populated country also is the largest group of internet users online. They make up almost 22% of internet’s population. Last year, according to Internet Live Stats, there was an estimated 641.6 million internet users in China (tweet this).

What’s surprising is only 46% of China’s population is online. To put that in perspective, in the United States, the state with the smallest penetration of their population online is Mississippi with 59%. There is still a lot of room for growth in China. Last year, they added 24 million new internet users.

2. India had 30 million new internet users last year.

Companies really should be paying attention to India. Over the past year, their total internet users grew by 14% (tweet this).

That’s almost a whole Canada in just one year (Canada has 33 million internet users online). Only 19% of India’s population is online so far, so the potential to be the leader in internet penetration in a few years is very realistic.

3. Looking at regions, the growth rate of internet traffic is slowing down in North America, Western Europe, and Oceania, but growing dramatically in developing regions.

Over the past five years, North America (5% growth), Western Europe (3% growth), and Oceania (8% growth) all saw single digit growth in internet traffic.

These numbers make sense because at some point, penetration of a population has to cap off.

In North America, 86% of the United States population are online, 91% in Canada

In Western Europe, 89% of the UK, 87% of Germany, and 85% of France are online.

Over 89% of Australia is online.

Regions like Eastern Europe (36% growth), Central America (49% growth), China (38% growth), and other parts of East Asia (40% growth) still saw double digit growth over the past five years.

However the real focus should be on South America, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. All of these regions have seen triple digit growth online.

Nigeria has more people online than United Kingdom. There are struggles with providing internet ready PCs, electricity, and infrastructure there. However, mobile has allowed connectivity to avoid some of these obstacles.

4. Despite all of these trends, over ⅔ of content online is still hosted in the United States.

We did an experiment studying Alexa Top 100 sites in many different countries, and tracked where their users end up getting routed to for hosting. Despite all these emerging internet populations, people visiting Alexa Top 100 sites are still getting routed to North America and Western Europe.

Traveling at these distances adds latency to a user’s experience, slowing down load times, especially for those in developing markets. In some cases, routing a user to the United States vs. a more local location can increase latency over 200%.

5. The supply of IPv4 addresses are gone, and IPv6 adoption is finally growing rapidly.

For years, the American Registry of Internet Numbers predicted that the supply of IPv4 numbers would be exhausted, and this past September, it finally happened. This means there should be more ISPs adopting IPv6, so you should be IPv6 ready for your customers.

Google recently reported that 26% of their traffic in the United States is coming from an IPv6 address. The time to roll out IPv6 is now.

6. Over 50% of tablets and smartphones offload their cellular data, using Wi-Fi.



As the tablet and smartphone markets are continuing to grow, so will Wi-Fi offloading. Juniper recently reported this past summer that they estimate by 2019, 60% of tablet and smartphone data will run over WIFI (tweet this). To put this in perspective, in 2014, this rate was just under 50%. So while there is a lot of mobile cellular data use, there is even more mobile device use.

7. Page complexity continues to skyrocket.

Web pages are continuing to get more complicated and bigger. The Alexa one million pages became 10% more complicated this year weighing in at 2.2 Mb and 102 different objects. The more interesting piece is that average number of different servers required to load a webpage increased to 18 this year from 16.

On to planning...



As your team is plotting out the next year or two, make sure your network expansion plan matches up with these trends. As the internet diversifies with new users, so should your online presence. Each of these trends presents an opportunity to stand out and acquire new customers. Here are some quick takeaways:

Focus more on building closer hosting in these high growth regions, so your customer doesn’t have to travel across the world to load content. Route your traffic properly so that users are always going to the fastest route possible. Make sure your network and content is IPv6/mobile ready.

Want to hear from me about building a company from scratch, or exploring internet technology, trends, and education? Follow me here.