The global average connection speed decreased by approximately seven percent between the second and third quarters of 2012 to 2.8 Mbps, according to Akamai’s newly released Third Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report.
The Akamai report, which uses data collected from its platforms deployed worldwide, provides insight into key global statistics including connection speeds, attack traffic, and network connectivity and availability, among many others. This edition provides additional analysis on the Operation Ababil DDoS attacks against the banking industry in the United States and an examination of mobile browser usage by network connection type.
Some highlights:
- Akamai connected with more than 680 million IPv4 addresses from 243 countries/regions during Q3 2012, up 11 percent increase year over year.
- Akamai estimates that over one billion unique web users connected to its platform during the quarter.
- China remained the single largest volume source of observed attack traffic at 33%, followed by United States at 13%, and Russia at 4.7%.
- “Operation Ababil”, the DDoS attack against U.S. banks that occurred in September 2012, generated up to 65 Gbps of total attack traffic that varied in target and technique. A significant portion (nearly 23 Gbps) of the attack traffic was aimed at the Domain Name System (DNS) servers that are used for Akamai’s Enhanced DNS services.
- Akamai observed global broadband (>4 Mbps) and high broadband (>10 Mbps) adoption showing solid gains in the quarter. The global high broadband adoption rate grew by 8.8 percent quarter over quarter, reaching 11 percent, while the global broadband adoption rate increased 4.8 percent, growing to 41 percent.
The full report is available online.