Worldwide Internet Speeds Are Dropping, But Australia’s On The Upswing


Akamai’s released its statistics on average worldwide internet connection speeds. The interesting news is that, despite advances in connection technologies, the average worldwide speed has actually dropped, although Australia is bucking that trend.

Akamai’s State of the Internet report for the last quarter of 2011 shows that the worldwide average has dropped slightly to an average of 2.3Mbps, although it’s still up year on year. Which is somewhat pleasing news for me personally, given I average around 3Mbps from my home ADSL2+ connection, although if I look at the Australian average, it’s a little sobering, as that’s still over 5Mbps. I’m sure there are some Giz readers in both much better and worse positions.

On the flip side, only one per cent of connections to Akamai from Australia were sub-256kbps. That’s potentially pleasing, although given Akamai’s role in load balancing, it’s perhaps indicative of people not using many of the services that rely on Akamai rather than total percentage figures. Year on year, though, we’re still going in only one direction, and that’s up.

Worldwide, though, the picture actually shows a dip in average connection speed of around 14 per cent from the previous quarter. I’m guessing that’s down to more connections from nations with much lower connection speeds, as is the case across most of Africa, for example. We’re still on a gradual upwards curve year on year, however.

As always seems to be the case in these kinds of figures, if you want fast averages, head to South Korea, where the average is 17.5Mbps. I wouldn’t actually kill for 17.5Mbps… maim badly perhaps. [Akamai via TechCrunch]


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