Global connection speeds increase to 3.1Mbps in Q1
South Korea had the fastest Internet connection, averaging 14.2Mbps, while the worldwide average climbed to 3.1Mbps in the first quarter, says a report from Akamai.
Akamai has released its State of the Internet report for the first quarter of 2013, and when it comes to connection speeds, things are looking up.
The Internet is growing, according to the company, which analyzed the Web through its Intelligent Platform analysis tool. It found that the total number of unique IPv4 addresses hitting the Internet in the first quarter reached 734 million, or approximately 34 million more than in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Meanwhile, Web connection speeds rose by 4 percent, climbing to a worldwide average of 3.1Mbps. The global average peak speed was 18.4Mbps.
South Korea is the world's leader in average connection speed, topping out at 14.2Mbps. Hong Kong was able to tally the highest peak connection speed of 63.6Mbps. South Korea's success was due mainly to its position as the world's leading broadband nation, with half of its citizens subscribing to the high-speed connection.
Akamai also offered up some data on security issues on the Web. The company found that attacks originated from 177 countries during the first quarter. Interestingly, China's attack traffic fell by 34 percent during the period, but Indonesia's impact as a source of security threats grew from 0 percent share to 20 percent. The U.S. accounted for 8 percent of all attacks.
One other interesting tidbit: traffic from mobile devices increased by 19 percent between the fourth quarter of 2012 and first quarter of 2013, and is double the mobile traffic from the first quarter of 2012.