Akamai Internet Report Highlights Speed, DDoS Increases

Global connectivity speeds are gradually increasing, China is the top country for origination of attack traffic, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks increased 50 percent last year. Those are some of the findings in a new State of the Internet Report from Akamai Technologies.

The report, covering the fourth quarter, is based on data obtained via the Akamai Intelligent Platform, a cloud-based delivery network. Its focus includes network connectivity, attack traffic, and broadband trends.

Bit by bit -- literally -- the average global connection speed is inching up, demonstrating an overall increase in speed of 27 percent over 2012. The report shows a quarterly increase of 5.5 percent, for an average of 3.8 Mbps. Although speeds are increasing on average, the report noted that half of the top 10 countries/regions actually showed decreases when compared with the previous quarter, decreases ranging from 0.7 percent to nearly 7 percent. South Korea continues to top the global list for connectivity speeds, with an average of 21.9 Mbps, but it also showed a quarter-over-quarter decline of 1.1 percent.

U.S. Reaches 10 Mbps

The U.S.'s average speed increased 2 percent to 10 Mbps, and 133 countries/regions showed higher average connection speeds in 2013 than in 2012. All of the top 10 countries/regions now have average connection speeds above 10 Mbps, putting them into the high broadband category.

David Belson, editor of the Akamai report, said in a statement that "the fact that all of the top 10 countries/regions average connection speeds are now at or exceeding the high broadband threshold [indicates] the progress that's being made in broadband penetration."

To track attack traffic, Akamai said it has distributed a set of "unadvertised agents across the Internet."

The report said that 188 countries/regions were identified as originating attack/traffic, although Akamai pointed out that this does not necessarily mean those are the...