With South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan taking the first three spots

Jul 27, 2010 15:32 GMT  ·  By

Akamai has released its quarterly State of the Internet report for Q1 2010. Its position as the largest content delivery network in the world means that it has a great perspective on global internet use. Its numbers are skewed in several situations, but, overall, they provide an interesting outlook. For the first quarter of 2010, the numbers of IP addresses connecting to the Akamai network increased by 7.2 percent reaching 487 million.

“Akamai observed a 7.2% increase (from the fourth quarter of 2009) globally in the number of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai’s network. From a global connection speed perspective, South Korea continued to have the highest level of ‘high broadband’ (>5 Mbps) connectivity,” Akamai said in the report.

“South Korea also maintained the highest average connection speed, at 12 Mbps, and recorded the highest average maximum connection speed, at 33 Mbps, where the per-IP address maximum connection speed was averaged across IP addresses from each country. Cities in South Korea also held many of the top spots in the rankings of highest average and average maximum connection speeds by city,” the report added.

The 487 million IPs don’t correlate directly to the number of people connecting to Akamai. Several users may be sharing the same IP, if they’re on the same local network, and the same user may have more than one IP in the same month, either because they’re connecting from different devices or if the ISP changes the assigned IP regularly.

By country, the report doesn’t see many changes from the previous quarter except for Brazil overtaking Spain and moving to the 9th place in the top 10 countries by connections list. The US leads in this ranking followed by China. In terms of speeds though, Asia dominates with the first three spots going to South Korea, with an average connection speed of 12 Mbps, Hong Kong with 9 Mbps, Japan with 7.9 Mbps. Europe then follows with Romania coming in fourth with an average of 6.3 Mbps, Latvia also with 6.3 Mbps and Sweden with 6.2 Mbps.