Akamai: Connection speed boost for video content

Cambridge-based Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report found the average USA connection speed to be 11.7 megabits per second last quarter, around half the speed of top-ranked South Korea.

A survey by Akamai said that connection speeds in Europe were showing a healthy growth by and large with seven countries in the global top 10 countries.

Year-over-year changes in average connection speeds were again consistently positive for Europe, pointing to continued improvements in Internet connectivity within surveyed countries. The average peak speed in the U.S.in Q2 was 50.4 Mbps (24th globally), up 11% year-on-year, and down 3.7% versus Q1 2015.

The UK’s active IPv4 address space rose by 15 percent in the second quarter of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014 to reach almost 31 million, even as the stock of IPv4 addresses runs dry.

Globally, 14 percent of unique IP addresses enjoyed an average connection speed of 15Mbps or greater, the standard threshold for 4K video.

Across the globe, the average peak connection speed in Q2 was 32.5 Mbps, up 26% from the year-ago quarter. The other top ten nations are Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Latvia, Finland, and Czech Republic. In the United Kingdom, the government stated its Broadband Delivery UK programme had enabled an additional 2.5 million premises to achieve broadband levels of at least 24 Mbps.

India does not figure in the top 10 countries for Internet speed. Of those, Japan saw the biggest gain, growing by 7.8 percent. Mobile traffic is up 55 percent year-to-year, as well. As a coming out of the revised calculations, Sweden regained the top spot with a 16.1 Mbps average connection speed, up 1.6 per cent from the first quarter.

Akamai, which helps web companies boost their loading speeds by distributing web files to locations that are closer to end users, compiled the information from the trillions of data transfers its network makes every quarter.