Akamai state of the Internet report reveals continued growth in European broadband adoption and high-speed Internet connectivity

CAMBRIDGE, USA: Akamai Technologies Inc., a leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, released its Q2, 2011 State of the Internet report.

Based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which serves as much as 30 percent of the world’s Web traffic at any one time, the report provides insight into key global statistics such as Internet penetration, mobile traffic and data consumption, origins of attack traffic and SSL usage, and global and regional connection speeds.

New to the Second Quarter 2011 edition of the report are sections breaking out data for Asia Pacific, Europe and the United States, making it easier to put global statistics into regional context.

European highlights from Akamai's 2011 Q2 report:
Global Internet Penetration
In the second quarter of 2011, more than 604 million unique IP addresses from 238 countries/regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform. This represents 3.4 percent more IP addresses than connected in the first quarter of 2011, and an increase of 21 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Of the European countries in the Top 10 listing, Italy (ranked #9) boasted the greatest quarterly gain at 5.4 percent, followed by a 1.7 percent gain by Spain (#10). The UK (#7) and France (#5) achieved 1.4 percent and 1.3 percent gains respectively, while Germany (#4) achieved just 0.4 percent quarterly growth.

100 fastest cities
In the second quarter of 2011, analysis of the Top 100 fastest cities around the world, based on average connection speeds, revealed the following:
• Cities in Asia continue to dominate the list, including 59 cities in Japan, 10 cities in South Korea, as well as Hong Kong.
• Brno, Czech Republic is the fastest city in Europe (#55 out of 100).
• In total, nine European cities made the Top 100 list.

Top 10 fastest European cities
Reviewing Q2 2011 analysis of the Top 10 European cities, based on average connection speeds, reveals:
• Brno, Czech Republic tops the list at 8.3 Mbps, followed closely by Geneva (#2) at 8.2 Mbps and Riga in Latvia (#3) at 8.1 Mbps.
• Average connection speeds in all Top 10 European cities are well above the 5Mbps ‘high broadband’ threshold.
• Timosoara, Romania is ranked #10, with an average connection speed of 6.9 Mbps.

Moving to high broadband connectivity
The move to ‘high broadband’ (5 Mbps and above) connectivity continues to go from strength to strength in Europe. Taking the top spot in high broadband adoption is the Netherlands, which now boasts 68 percent of its country’s connections to Akamai above 5Mbps with an impressive 22 percent quarterly increase.

In the second quarter of 2011 six European countries had more than half their connections to Akamai at speeds of 5 Mbps or above. Quarterly increases ranged from a mere 1.2 percent in Romania to an impressive 65 percent in Spain, and year-on-year six European countries achieved high broadband adoption growth rates in excess of 100 percent (Switzerland, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Italy and Turkey).

The strength of broadband adoption across Europe is further illustrated by the fact that in Q2 2011 more than half the connections of all European countries listed were at speeds of 2Mbps or over.

Mobile connection speeds and data consumption
The average measured connection speed for known mobile providers worldwide ranged from a high of slightly more than 5 Mbps to a low of 209 kbps. Approximately three-quarters of the surveyed providers had average connection speeds above 1 Mbps.

Reviewing the data, the highest average peak connection speed for the quarter was observed on a mobile provider in Austria (23.4 Mbps), while a mobile provider in Spain saw average peak connection speeds increase by more than 100 percent quarter-over-quarter.

During the second quarter of 2011, users at 10 of the surveyed mobile providers consumed an average of 1 GB or more per month from the Akamai platform, while users at 74 of the surveyed providers consumed more than 100 MB of content from Akamai. According to data collected by Ericsson, the volume of mobile data traffic doubled year-over-year and grew 8 percent quarter-over-quarter.

Attack traffic and SSL trends
Europe generated 30 percent of all attack traffic observed by Akamai in Q2 2011. Examining attack traffic from just mobile network providers, the percentage of observed traffic originating from Italy fell by half compared to Q1 (down to 14 percent), pushing it down the Top 10 Country/Region listing to second place (after the United States).

New to this quarter’s report is an examination of trends in SSL ciphers presented by Web clients to the Akamai Secure Content Delivery Network. Since the beginning of 2009, Akamai notes the use of the SSL cipher AES 128-SHA-1 has nearly tripled while the use of SSL cipher RC4-MD5-128 has declined by almost two-thirds.

UK country highlights
• 30 percent of UK broadband connections are above 5Mbps. A 70 percent year on year increase, and 18 percent quarter on quarter. This places the UK 25th in the “High Broadband Connectivity, Fastest European Countries” table.
• The UK comes 11th with 91 percent of connections above 2Mbps in the “Broadband Connectivity, Fast European Countries” table. This is a quarter on quarter increase of 2.9 percent and 10 percent year on year.
• The UK was ranked 6th for “Global Internet Penetration” with a quarter on quarter growth of 3.5 percent and year on year growth of 15 percent.
• No UK city features in the “Average Connection Speed, Top 100 Global Cities” table, but the UK comes 28th in the “Average Peak Connection Speed by European Country” table with a speed of 18.9Mbps.

Enhanced data visualization tool
The companion data visualization tool launched in conjunction with the first quarter 2011 State of the Internet report, has been enhanced and includes an expanded data window, which now ranges from Q3 2007 to Q2 2011. The tool allows users to generate and download graphs highlighting and comparing average connection speed, average peak connection speed, and high broadband/broadband/narrowband adoption rates.