Akamai delivers a lot of content around the globe and every quarter they look at overall trends in bandwidth and connectivity. The 2Q11 report is out now and like the last edition, you can have some fun with choosing particular states or countries and graphing their overall trends right on the home page linked above. Akamai carries a lot of the big-ticket Internet traffic across its network, ranging up to a third of overall global traffic.
“During the second quarter of 2011, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 192 unique countries/regions around the world. Taiwan was the top attack traffic source, accounting for 10% of observed attack traffic in total. Myanmar and the United States held the second and third place spots, respectively,” the report starts off. You can see a distribution of the top attack ports shown in the pie chart here, with more than a third on Microsoft SMB port 445, no surprise there. The good news is that “SSL appears to be getting safer and more secure over time,” from stronger encryption protocols being used and from newer and more secure browsers.
South Korea lost its top spot to Holland in terms of overall high-speed broadband adoption, as you can see from the chart below. According to Akamai, Korea actually saw a 17% dip in their average connection speeds year over year. China has seen a 27% year-to-year increase in unique IP addresses but the UK is up 35% year over year. There are a lot more statistics in the full report that looks at country usage from a variety of angles.
We also looked at samples across three states for their average connection speeds too.
Some other interesting tidbits from the report:
- For the first time in recent memory, Delaware is no longer being the fastest state in the union, as strong quarterly growth in Rhode Island drove that state’s average connection speed up to 8.2 Mbps, just slightly ahead of Delaware.
- Sadly, the one statistic that was somewhat depressing was that on World IPv6 Day earlier this summer, only 280,000 unique IPv6 addresses made content requests to Akamai over the course of the day. IPv6 adoption is happening slowly, but is inevitable given that there really aren’t any new IPv4 addresses left.
- Of the top ten cities in terms of average connection speed, only one – San Jose, California – is from outside Japan and South Korea. And I am sure the stats are influenced by all the Silicon Valley businesses that have Internet pipes in that area, not from residential broadband. The next American city to make the list is at no. 51, Fredericksburg, Va.
- Reinforcing that Amsterdam is a hacker’s haven, Netherlands had the highest level of high-speed broadband adoption, at 68% of its residents getting connectivity at greater than 5 Mbps service. Amsterdam is no. 66 on the top list of cities, by the way.
- There is continued use of mobile broadband networks as an attack source, most likely from PCs that are connected to these networks and not through smartphones themselves, given the kinds of port scans and other exploits observed. Speaking of mobile networks, providers in Greece and Poland topped the list of average connection speed in this category.
You can download the full 48-page copy of the report after registering on Akamai’s site above.
