Akamai, a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) that claims to manage 20% of all online traffic, has released its latest Q4-2010 State of the Internet report. This revealed that the average broadband ISP connection speed in the UK had increased from 3.9Mbps in Q2-2010 to 4Mbps in Q3-2010, before finally jumping to 4.3Mbps in Q4.

The report also found that 22% of broadband users in the UK experience speeds of more than 5Mbps (up from 17% in Q3-2010), while 87% (up from 85% in Q3-2010) achieve performance above 2Mbps and just 0.7% (down from 0.9% in Q3-2010) of the country experiences speeds of less than 256Kbps (0.25Mbps). 16.1Mbps was the PEAK recorded UK connection speed, while Bradford managed to make place 99 in the Top 100 Fastest Cities list with an average speed of 6.09Mbps. The fastest was Taegu in South Korea with 18.36Mbps.

By contrast Ofcom claims that the country's national average is more like 6.2Mbps (here), well above Akamai's estimate. The average global internet connection speed was largely unchanged and hovered just below the 2Mbps mark on 1.98Mbps. The fastest country in the world is still South Korea, with an average of 13.7Mbps, although this has been in decline since hitting 17Mbps in Q2 last year.


In terms of Mobile Broadband performance the average UK speed was 2.5Mbps, which is up from 2.2Mbps in Q3-2010. Mobile operator Three (3) delivered the fastest global peak speed of a staggering 21Mbps. It's unclear whether this speed came from measuring the performance of a compressed data source or not (downloading compressed data gives a more realistic estimate of physical performance).

Apparently none of the 105 providers had average mobile connection speeds in the greater than 5Mbps range, while 18 providers had average speeds of over 2Mbps and an additional 48 offered average connection speeds in excess of 1Mbps.

Akamai's State of the Internet Q4 2010 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/