The Akamai global Content Delivery Network (CDN) has today released its latest quarterly State of the Internet Q3 2011 report, which reveals that the average global internet download speed has climbed by 4.5% to 2.7Mbps (up from 2.6Mbps in Q2-2011). By comparison the UK average speed has increased to 5.1Mbps (up from 5Mbps in Q2-2011), which sees our world ranking fall from 25th (Q2) to 27th (Q3) fastest.

As a result the UK remains a long way off the fastest country in the world, South Korea, which uses a national superfast fibre optic ( FTTH ) telecoms infrastructure to deliver average download speeds of 16.7Mbps (up from 13.8Mbps in Q2)! According to Akamai, the fastest European state was the Netherlands (global rank of 5th) with an unchanged speed of 8.5Mbps, which oddly ignores Latvia's 8.9Mbps.


The report notes that 31% of broadband users in the UK experienced download speeds of over 5.1Mbps (up from 30% in Q2), while an unchanged 91% received more than 2Mbps (the governments minimum speed target for 2015) and just 0.5% suffered speeds of less than 256Kbps (down from 0.6% in Q2). The UK's PEAK recorded speed hit 20Mbps in Q3, which is up from 18.9Mbps in Q2.

Elsewhere the average UK mobile download speed ( Mobile Broadband ) stood unchanged at approximately 2.87Mbps, yet the average monthly mobile data consumption per user saw a rise from 698MB (MegaBytes) in Q2-2011 to 754MB in Q3.

A mobile provider in Poland claimed the highest global average mobile speed by hitting 6.1Mbps. By comparison the worlds slowest mobile operator (lowest average connection speed) was found in Thailand at 149Kbps (0.15Mbps). This is most likely attributed to flooding, which ravaged the country at the end of last year.

Akamai's State of the Internet Q3 2011 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/