A report of tech firm Akamai for the fourth quarter of 2016 has revealed that the Philippines has the slowest Internet speed in the whole of Asia Pacific.
In its 2016 State of the Internet Report, Akamai said South Korea was again the top country in the world for the average connection speed metric, despite a 0.7% quarter-over-quarter decrease in average connection speeds. The gap between South Korea and the slowest country in Asia Pacific — the Philippines — remained steady at 22 Mbps.
Excluding South Korea, the surveyed countries in Asia Pacific all enjoyed quarterly gains in the fourth quarter, with increases ranging from 4.9% in Australia to 36% in India. Seven countries enjoyed double-digit quarterly gains, compared with three in the third quarter.
All 15 of the surveyed Asia Pacific countries had average connection speeds above 4 Mbps, just as they did in the third quarter. Eight of these exceeded 10 Mbps, up from seven in third quarter.
India and the Philippines once again had the lowest average connection speeds among surveyed Asia Pacific countries, at 5.6 Mbps and 4.5 Mbps, respectively.
?Internet connection speeds continued to show positive long-term trends around the world, with particularly strong year-over-year increases across all broadband adoption metrics,? said David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report.
?When Akamai first published the report in 2008, we defined ?high broadband? as 5 Mbps and above, which nine years ago had an adoption rate of 16% globally. We?re now seeing a 15 Mbps adoption rate of 25% worldwide.?
Some highlights of the report:
Global average connection speeds and global broadband adoption
? Global average connection speed increased 12% to 7.0 Mbps in the fourth quarter, a 26% increase year over year.
? South Korea again had the highest average connection speed globally at 26.1 Mbps in the fourth quarter.
? At 26.7 Mbps, the District of Columbia led the United States in average connection speed.
? Global 4, 10, 15 and 25 Mbps broadband adoption rates increased 15%, 31%, 37% and 45% year over year, respectively.
IPv4 and IPv6
? In the fourth quarter of 2016, nearly 807 million unique IPv4 addresses connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which is a 0.4% decrease as compared to the fourth quarter of 2015.
? There was significantly less IPv4 allocation/assignment activity in the fourth quarter, with 6.4 million addresses allocated/assigned versus 16 million in the third quarter.
? With 47% percent of its content requests to Akamai coming over IPv6, Belgium maintained its significant global lead in IPv6 adoption with a 20% quarter-over-quarter increase.
Mobile
? Average mobile connection speeds ranged from a high of 26.8 Mbps in the United Kingdom to a low of 2.9 Mbps in Venezuela.
? Among the qualifying surveyed countries/regions, 30 had an average mobile connection speed at or exceeding the 10 Mbps broadband threshold (up from 24 in the previous quarter), while 58 achieved average speeds at or above the 4 Mbps broadband level (up from 52).
Disruptions and events
? During Hurricane Matthew in October, Internet traffic to the Bahamas dropped to approximately one-tenth of normal levels for the country.
? Internet traffic levels to Gambia abruptly dropped to zero on November 30, shortly ahead of the country?s December 1 elections, and returned to normal on December 2.
? On several dates, the Iraqi government continued its policy of blocking Internet access across the country to prevent cheating during middle and high school national exams.
? Technical issues at the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) were blamed for a sudden drop in traffic to the country in December.
