Broadband Adoption Rising, But Internet Speeds Still Slow in India: Akamai

Akamai has released its second quarter 'State of the Internet' report. This report states that the global average Internet speed increased 21 percent as compared to the first quarter of this year. The current global average Internet speed is 4.6Mbps. India, at 2Mbps, is still far below the global average. The global average peak connection speed is 25.4Mbps, while that for India is 14.4Mbps, the report said.

Mobile Internet speeds were also slow in India, when compared to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan had the best average mobile Internet speed at 5.7Mbps, while India's average speed was just 1.4Mbps.

However, the report says the pace of broadband adoption in India is rising fast. Broadband adoption rate in India has grown over 5 times since the second quarter of 2012 and 10 times since the second quarter of 2011, according to the report.

Akamai says it expects broadband adoption to accelerate even further after the National Broadband Policy is finalised by the Department of Telecom.

The Akamai report said that the largest year-over-year rise in broadband adoption rates were seen in countries with lowest levels of adoption. Vietnam was the top of this list at 722 percent, with India at the fourth spot with a big 179 percent increase.

The report also looks at the percentage of broadband traffic in a country that engages in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. India, at 2.1 percent, took the fifth spot in this list. China (43.1 percent), Indonesia (15 percent), USA (13 percent) and Taiwan (3.7 percent) were the 4 nations with the highest proportion of DDoS attacks, according to Akamai.

Akamai's State of the Internet report includes data gathered from across the Akamai Intelligent Platform about attack traffic, broadband adoption, mobile connectivity and other relevant topics concerning the Internet and its usage.