11.7 Mbps on average in Q4 2009

Apr 19, 2010 13:25 GMT  ·  By

To say that the Internet is getting faster is like saying the Earth revolves around the Sun, it’s not going to surprise anyone. But to say how much faster and what countries lead the pack, that’s another story. Thankfully, we have Akamai’s State of the Internet quarterly report to help us out. The report for the fourth quarter of 2009 has come out and it shows that things are moving as fast as always. In Q4 2009, 4.7 percent more unique IPs connected to Akamai’s network than in the previous quarter.

In total, 465 million unique IPs connected to Akamai from 234 countries, a significant percentage of the world’s Internet users. Of course, there are plenty of ISPs that don’t assign a unique external IP to all of their subscribers, by using NAT, for example, so the number is likely even bigger. Still, it’s an increase of 16 percent over the same period in the previous year when there were 401 million unique connections. In Q4 2007, that number was of 312 million.

The US leads in terms of unique IPs using Akamai, the company is based in the US, so this may have an influence on that number, with almost 125 million connections. China comes second with over 52 million connections, followed by Japan with 32 million, Germany with almost 31 million and France with 21 million.

In terms of broadband speeds, things haven’t changed much and the numbers are generally on the rise. The one very notable exception is the country on top of the list, South Korea, where average Internet connection speeds declined by 24 percent in just one quarter, to 11.7 Mbps, and are down 29 percent over the previous year. Akamai says this is likely due to the popularity of the iPhone, which was released in November in the country. The new connections from the slower mobile network brought down the average speed quite a bit.

South Korea is followed by Hong Kong with an 8.6 Mbps average, Japan with 7.6 Mbps, Romania with 7.2 Mbps and Latvia with 6.2 Mbps. The final two countries also saw the biggest rise, growing by 28 percent in just one year. In terms of high-speed, 5 Mbps and above, broadband availability, things are pretty similar. South Korea leads with 68 percent of connections being above 5 Mbps. Japan follows with 59 percent, Romania with 49 percent, Hong Kong with 48 percent and Sweden with 43 percent.