BANGALORE, INDIA: Akamai Technologies, Inc., the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced the release of the first quarter 2009 edition of its quarterly State of the Internet report.

Leveraging information gathered from its network and published reports, Akamai's quarterly report provides insight into key Internet statistics such as origin of attack traffic, network and Web site outages and Internet connectivity levels across the globe.

Highlights and trends from the report for India are as below:

Commenting on the report, Sanjay Singh, managing director, Akamai, said, “We continue to see strong trends that suggest an ever-improving Internet penetration figures in India.  For example, this quarter we reported the number of unique IPs in India has gone up 52Per cent year over year and the average connections speed was at 898 Kbps.  The average connection speed will be an interesting number to track in the coming quarters as it will give us a clear indication of the growing broadband adoption rates in the country.”

Fastest Global Countries

From a global connection speed perspective, Japan unseated South Korea for the highest levels of “high broadband” (>5 Mbps) connectivity, though South Korea maintained the highest average connection speed, at 11 Mbps.  For the first time since publishing the State of the Internet report in the first quarter of 2008, South Korea no longer had the largest percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds above 5 Mbps, with a significant 25Per cent decline.  Akamai also saw fewer unique IP addresses from South Korea during the first quarter, along with a lower average connection speed. 

The first place spot was taken by Japan, with 57Per cent of connections to Akamai at high broadband levels.  Nearly a third of Japan’s connections to Akamai are at speeds between 5-10 Mbps.  Sweden showed a similar percentage of connections between 5-10 Mbps, while other countries in the top 10 saw levels below 30 percent.

Akamai's unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of systems issuing requests to the Akamai network has created a one-of-a-kind view into broadband adoption around the globe. Leveraging that data, Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet report identifies and compares Internet penetration and connections speeds in India with countries across the world.