The Rising Tide of Internet Speeds and Data Consumption

While superfast Internet access is still scarce, average speeds worldwide inch up, and attacks rise, too.

David Talbotarchive page

January 28, 2014

We hear a lot about a few standout efforts to boost Internet speeds here and there (see “When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?”). But ultimately, what’s more relevant are broad-based trends, and there’s some good news:

+ Average connection speeds globally increased 29 percent in the past year, to 3.6 megabits per second.

+ Mobile traffic increased by about 10 percent during the third quarter of 2013, and grew by 80 percent year over year.

With that comes some bad:

+ Denial-of-service attacks keep rising; the first three quarters of 2013 had already surpassed the levels of all of 2012.

+ The top three countries from which Internet attacks were launched were China at 35 percent; Indonesia at 20 percent; and the United States at 11 percent.

Those are a few highlights of the latest state of the Internet report released today from Akamai, covering the third quarter of 2013. The company, which provides cloud-based Web optimization and caching services, has also launched a new iPhone app that gives interactive access to its Internet measuring data.