Akamai State of the Internet Report for Q4 2008…
Most things on the web are free and in abundance. Something that bucks this trend is data about internet usage, web traffic trends, specially what’s dependable and comes from a credible source. In my day job with SlideShare, this factor has caused me so much heartburn, that it’s just not funny!
Come Akamai and their quarterly internet traffic trends are a treasure trove of insights into whats running in the world’s internet pipes. They release this every quarter and it is free. Check out the Akamai State of the Internet report for Quarter 4 (Q4) that has just been released. To read the report, use the full screen button on the bottom right or head to slideshare to download your own copy.
Much as I hate to copy/paste directly from press releases, this is one press release that needs to be quoted verbatim. Check out the India specific highlights…
* India ranked #20 globally for number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai, with 2.63 million IP’s
- Up 42.91% year-over-year, and 1.69% from Q3 2008
- In comparison, United States was ranked #1 with 114.1 million unique IPs
* India’s average connection speed was at 772 Kbps and ranked #115 in terms of average connection speed
- Globally, the average connection speed was approximately 1.5 Mbps
- The United States ranked #17 globally, with an average connection speed of 3.9 Mbps while South Korea ranked #1 with an average connection speed of 15 Mbps
* India ranked #17 globally in terms of attack traffic, with 1.16% of observed attack traffic
- In comparison, United States was ranked #1 with 22.85% of observed attack traffic
* India ranked #148 globally for number of unique IP addresses per capita, with 0.0023
* India ranked #62 globally for high broadband adoption, with 0.56% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 5 Mbps
* India ranked #81 globally for high broadband penetration, with fewer than 0.0001 high broadband IPs per capita in Q4 2008
* India ranked #93 globally for broadband adoption, with 3.74% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 2 Mbps
* India ranked #118 globally for broadband penetration, with 0.0001broadband IPs per capita in Q4 2008
* India ranked #55 globally for narrowband adoption, with 25.8% of connections to Akamai at speeds below 256 Kbps
So what do you think of the above figures? Makes sense?
Something that seems hard to swallow is “India’s average connection speed was at 772 Kbps”. Can this be really true or it is likely to be a biased sample. For Akamai’s data is likely to be based on the CDN traffic which is flowing through their network and it can be argued that CDN usage is probably confined to high end usage (web 2.0, media sharing etc).
I posed this question to Akamai and their reply is thought provoking. Akamai says that CDN usage being top end in India is a myth for they are serving 20% of the Internet traffic, 29/30 top media companies, 40/40 top internet retailers and 6 of the largest media houses (in India). Being global leaders, they are in a unique position to track global traffic and they see every IP address in International once in a week. Since users always access the top sites atleast once in a quarter (which seems like a reasonable assumption!), they are able to track everyone and their connectivity speed. The 772 kbps figure may be in part attributed to the proliferation of most of the IP addresses from workplaces and cybercafés.
