The latest quarterly (Q4-2008) State of the Internet research from Akamai has revealed that nearly 20% of the world's broadband ISP users are connecting at speeds greater than 5Mbps, which shrinks to just 8% for British users where the average speed is closer to 3.5Mbps. South Korea came top, again, with average speeds of 15Mbps. Globally, the average connection speed was approximately 1.5Mbps.

The full report also covers which countries were the sources for most Attack Traffic (distributed denial of service attacks etc.) and unique IP (Internet Protocol) addresses (good gauge of penetration by country per Internet connected computer). To save time we've cut and pasted the main summary graphic below, which is mostly self-explanatory.


South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway had more high (faster connection) broadband IP’s per capita than in the prior quarter. This is consistent with what would be expected from the initiatives to bring higher speed connectivity, including FTTH (Fibre to the Home) efforts, to consumers in these countries.

We expect that the UK will eventually creep up this list, in terms of high end broadband performance, especially once BT begins deploying its faster FTTC (40 to 60Mbps) broadband infrastructure next year. Virgin Media's new 50Mbps products, along with many smaller local FTTH (i3 Group etc.) initiatives should also help over the coming years.

Internationally, the percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds greater than 2 Mbps continues to be more clustered than the high broadband data. Just 12% separated No.1 Tunisia (96%) and No.10 Germany (84%) — the gap was 20% in Q1-2008, 15% in the Q2-2008 and just 13% in the Q3-2008.