When it comes to Internet speeds, the USA is number 16 worldwide

By Justin Pot December 18, 2015

akamai survey q1 2017 crowd on internet browsing laptop mobile tablet app device

The average global Internet speed is 5 megabits per second, a 14 percent increase from last year. The average speed in the U.S. is 12.6 Mbps, meaning the country has the 16th fastest Web access in the world. The fastest? South Korea, at 20.5 Mbps.

That’s all according to Akamai’s Q3 2015 State Of The Internet report, which offers a plethora of data anyone interested in the Web should check out.

While South Korea leads the world in highest average speed, Singapore offered the highest peak connection speed: 135.4 Mbps.

Defining “broadband” as speeds of 25 Mbps or faster, 5.2 percent of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai worldwide are broadband. That’s a 6.3 percent increase from last year.

So home Internet is getting faster, all over the planet. But connectivity is increasingly mobile. The report notes a 14 percent increase in mobile traffic.

As a content delivery network (CDN), Akamai hosts images and videos embedded on a wide variety of sites. This means it serves up content, constantly, to people around the world — making the company well positioned to measure Internet speeds.

They do that, and more, in their quarterly report, the latest 60-page incarnation of which you can find here.

Here’s a few more highlights from the report:

Belgium leads the world in IPV6 usage, with 35 per cent of requests from that nation using the protocol. Most of the top countries are in Western Europe.
The largest DDoS attack in 2015 was an unprecedented 249 Gbps.
Gaming companies faced half of all DDoS attacks in 2015, likely for reasons related to ethics.
Shellshock, once the tool of choice for attacking Web apps, is in decline as the problem is being patched. The new favorites: Local file inclusion and SQL injection.
Attacks on WordPress plugins are way up, particularly obscure plugins with security problems.

So this isn’t all good news. Clearly cyber attacks of all sorts are up. Still, the Web is getting faster — which is good news for everyone.

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