BANGALORE, INDIA: Akamai Technologies, Inc., a provider in online transactions and enterprise applications, announced on Tuesday the release of the fourth edition of its quarterly ;State of the Internet' report, that provides insight into key Internet statistics such as origin of attack traffic, network outages and broadband connectivity levels across the globe.

According to the report, United States was ranked first as far as the numbers of unique IPs are concerned. The country has 114.1 million unique IPs.

India was positioned at number 20 globally for number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai, with 2.63 million IPs, 42.91 per cent up year-over-year, and 1.69 per cent up from Q3 2008, the report said.

The report said that at the end of 2008, approximately 19 per cent of Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps, representing a 21 per cent increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007.

In line with their average connection speed of 15 Mbps, and their appearance at the top of the list for the prior three quarters, South Korea once again ranked as the country with the highest percentage of connections at high broadband (5 Mbps) speeds.

India's average connection speed was at 772 Kbps and ranked #115 in terms of average connection speed, whereas globally, the average connection speed was approximately 1.5 Mbps.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, the State of the Internet report began tracking average connection speeds for countries around the world in which India ranked 81 globally for high broadband penetration, whereas it ranked 118 globally for broadband penetration.

Looking at the levels of high broadband penetration in the fourth quarter, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway had more high broadband IPs per capita than in the prior quarter, said the report.

This is consistent with what would be expected from the initiatives to bring higher speed connectivity, including Fiber-to-the-Home efforts, to consumers in these countries, the report said.

During the fourth quarter of 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 193 unique countries around the world, up nearly 8 per cent from the third quarter count of 179 countries. India ranked number 17 globally, with 1.16 per cent of observed attack traffic. In comparison, the United States was ranked number one with 22.85 per cent of observed attack traffic.

"We continue to see strong trends that point to an ever-improving Internet penetration figures in India with observed unique IPs growing 43 per cent Y-o-Y and average connections speed well above 750 Kbps," said Sanjay Singh, managing director-India, Akamai Technologies.

He further said that the average connection speed will be an interesting number to track in the coming quarters and will give us a clear indication of the growing broadband adoption in the country.