Broadband adoption rate in India zooms: Akamai

The broadband adoption rate in India continued to surge, witnessing a year-on-year growth in excess of 100 per cent, according to a report released by Akamai Technologies. The increase in broadband adoption quarter-over-quarter was 17 per cent. The report is based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform and provides insights into global statistics such as internet penetration, mobile connection speeds, origins of attack traffic and global and regional connection speeds.

And while this is a good sign, as of now, India has only 0.1 per cent connections that can be qualified as high broadband connections. Note that according to Akamai, broadband is connections at speeds of 4 Mbps or higher, while high broadband is connections at speeds of 10 Mbps or more.

Average and peak connection speeds

In terms of connection speeds, India's average internet connection speed was above 1Mbps in the second quarter, a growth of almost five per cent quarter-over-quarter. In comparison, the global average connection speed increased 13 per cent to 3.0 Mbps from the first to second quarters of 2012, continuing a trend of strong growth. South Korea continued to have the highest average connection speed at 14.2 Mbps for the quarter, while Japan was second at 10.7 Mbps followed by Hong Kong with 8.9 Mbps. The most significant quarter-over-quarter increase in average connection speed was Kenya's 227 per cent to 1.8 Mbps.

In contrast, India's peak connection speed was 7.3Mbps, an increase of almost six per cent quarter-over-quarter. The global average peak connection speed grew 44 per cent year over year, while Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan continued their dominance with peak connection speeds of 49.2Mbps, 46.9Mbps and 40.5Mbps respectively for the second quarter.

Attack traffic

The report identified the top countries from where attack traffic originated. While China remained the single largest volume source of observed traffic at 16 per cent, US also experienced a slight increase in originated attack traffic and stayed at second place with 12 per cent.  Turkey came third with an increase in the second quarter to 7.6 per cent. In comparison, India came at the eight position with a relatively low 2.9 per cent. Attack traffic is basically the traffic generated to carry out denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack).

Mobile connectivity

The fastest mobile average connection speed in the second quarter was 7.5 Mbps, delivered by a mobile provider in Russia, while the fastest mobile average peak connection speed for the quarter came from a provider in the UK at 44.4 Mbps.