South Korea, Delaware Lead World and U.S. in Broadband Connectivity

South Korea again tops the list of countries with the greatest levels of high broadband (greater than 5 Mbps) connectivity in Q2, while Delaware leads U.S. states, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report from Akamai, writes MarketingCharts.

The report, which provides quarterly internet statistics on global broadband connectivity levels, origins of online attack traffic and network outages, finds that 64% of South Korea’s connections to Akamai occurred at 5 Mbps or greater. Japan, Hong Kong, Sweden and Belgium rounded out the top-five countries with fastest internet connections. The U.S. ranks sixth.

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, Rwanda and the Solomon Islands have the slowest internet speeds, with 93% or more of the connections to Akamai from both countries occurring at below 256 Kbps - view map.

South Korea also leads the world in the number of high broadband IPs per capita. The U.S. ranks fifth. Sweden has the highest internet penetration rate, while the U.S. ranks seventh (map).

Among U.S. states, Delaware had 65% of connections to Akamai occurring at 5 Mbps or greater, followed by Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut and Oklahoma. (See map of U.S. states with the fastest broadband.)

Washington state and Washington, DC had the most sub-256 Kbps connections. However, in contrast to the international measurements, they only saw 21% and 16% of connections below 256 Kbps, respectively.

Other Q2 findings:

• More than 346 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai global server network, a 5% increase over Q1.
• Internet attack traffic originated from 139 unique countries. Japan and the U.S. were the two largest attack-traffic sources, accounting for more than 50% of observed traffic in total.
• Attack traffic targeted more than 400 unique network ports, a twenty-fold increase over Q1. Many of the ports that saw the highest levels of attack traffic were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the internet several years ago.
• “SQL injection” website hacks continued to spread, infecting hundreds of thousands of web pages.
• Significant website outages occurred during Q2, including problems at Amazon.com’s e-commerce site, Slashdot.org, and large shared hosting providers, as well as the “cloud computing” platforms delivered by Google and Amazon.com.
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks affected targets that were identified several years ago, suggesting there is still a significant population of insufficiently patched systems connected to the Internet.
• From a protocol perspective, Q2 saw increased DNS resolution capacity, steps toward additional generic top-level domains, and a key IPv6 deadline for the US federal government.

About the research: Akamai extrapolates data gathered across its network and analyzes the origins of attack traffic, network outages and de-peering events. It also tracks broadband connectivity by geography.