Akamai, a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) that claims to handle roughly 20% of all internet (web) traffic, has released its latest State of the Internet Q2 2011 report and found that the average global broadband ISP download speed has leapt to 2.6Mbps (up from 2.1Mbps in Q1-2011). By contrast the UK average speed has increased to 5.0Mbps (up from 4.6Mbps in Q1), which ranks us as 25th fastest in the world.

It should be said that Ofcom UK's latest fixed line broadband ISP speeds study (here) put the national average at a considerably more respectable 6.8Mbps, which is well above Akamai's estimate. A number of similar UK based surveys have posted even higher results, although Pando Networks (another CDN like Akamai) estimated that we were actually closer to 4.69Mbps (here). Swings and roundabouts.

As usual we're still quite far below South Korea, which is the fastest country in the world and benefits from average download speeds of 13.8Mbps (down from 14.4Mbps in Q1). This is thanks, in no small part, to their true superfast fibre optic based Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) telecoms infrastructure. The Netherlands (ranked 4th) came out as the fastest European state with 8.5Mbps.


The report notes that 30% of broadband users in the UK experienced speeds of over 5Mbps (up from 25% in Q1), while 91% achieve above 2Mbps (up from 89% in Q1) and just 0.6% suffered speeds of less than 256Kbps (unchanged from Q1). The UK's PEAK recorded internet connection speed also managed to hit 18.9Mbps (up from 17.2Mbps in Q1).

As for Mobile Broadband performance, the average UK speed stood at just over 2.87Mbps (up from 2.7Mbps in Q1) and the average monthly mobile data consumption per user was approximately 698MB (MegaBytes), which is up from 584MB in Q1. By contrast Ofcom reports that the average UK mobile download speed is just 1.5Mbps (Megabits per second) - rising to 2.1Mbps in areas of "good 3G coverage" (here).

This quarter a mobile provider in Greece claimed the highest average mobile connection speed at 5.3Mbps and the mobile provider with the slowest average connection speed was one in Slovakia at just 209Kbps (0.2Mbps).

Akamai's State of the Internet Q2 2011 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/