Akamai, which claims to handle approximately 20% of all internet (web) traffic via their global Content Delivery Network, has today released its latest Q1 2011 State of the Internet report. The new study finds that average UK broadband ISP download speeds have increased to 4.6Mbps (up from 4.3Mbps in Q4-2010), which is well above the marginally improved average global internet connection speed of 2.1Mbps (up from 1.98Mbps in Q4-2010).

By contrast Ofcom claims that the United Kingdom's national average real-world speed is more like 6.2Mbps (full details), which is well above Akamai's estimate. Unfortunately we're still quite far below South Korea, which is the fastest country in the world. SK benefits from average speeds of 14.4Mbps, thanks in no small part to their true fibre optic FTTH telecoms infrastructure.


The report also found that 25% of broadband users in the UK experience speeds of more than 5Mbps (up from 22% in Q4-2010), while 89% achieve above 2Mbps (up from 87% in Q4-2010) and just 0.6% of the country experiences speeds of less than 256Kbps (down from 0.7% in Q3-2010). 17.2Mbps was the PEAK recorded UK connection speed, which is up from 16.1Mbps in Q1-2010.

As for Mobile Broadband performance, the average UK speed stood at just over 2.7Mbps (up from 2.5Mbps in Q4-2010) and the average monthly mobile data consumption per user was approximately 584MB (MegaBytes). By contrast a mobile provider in Poland claimed the highest average connection speed at just over 6.1 Mbps. The mobile provider with the slowest average connection speed was one in Slovakia at just 163Kbps (0.16Mbps).

The report also briefly covered the growing issue of IPv4 internet address space exhaustion, which predicts that the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe (RIPE NCC) will run out of addresses during March 2012 as it only has 3.5428 /8s left to allocate. Readers may recall that the Asian Pacific RIR, APNIC, ran out of IPv4's during April of this year (here).

Akamai's State of the Internet Q1 2011 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/