Australia now leads the Asia-Pacific region for average mobile internet speeds at 13.8Mbps. But it has a way to go with an average of 10.1Mbps for fixed broadband.
Akamai, the leading content delivery provider, stated in its Q4 2016 State of the Internet - Connectivity Report that we tend to forget that Australia is currently building an Internet network across an entire continent. Providing fast, reliable mobile and fixed internet to a vast rural population of this scale is a challenge that no other country must deal with. It is hard to compare Australia’s speeds to a small and densely populated country like Singapore for example, where a single switch provides hundreds of thousands of people with the Internet.
It says the key point is how good Australia’s mobile connectivity is, well ahead of the USA, leading Asia Pacific and even surpassing Japan. It is essential for the future of connectivity to have a solid mobile network, as people are increasingly consuming more high-quality content like video on mobile devices.
David Belson, the editor of the State of the Internet Report, said, “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. When Akamai first published the report in 2008, we defined ‘high broadband’ as 5Mbps and above, which nine years ago, had an adoption rate of 16% globally. We’re now seeing a 15Mbps adoption rate of 25% worldwide. The upward trends are encouraging as businesses create and deliver even richer experiences for bigger audiences across the Internet, but accentuate the need for organizations to optimize those experiences for the myriad connected devices their customers are using.”
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Highlights from Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet Report:
Fixed broadband connection Speeds
- Global average connection speed increased 12% to 7.0Mbps, a 26% increase YoY.
- Australia averages 10.1Mbps, a 24% increase YoY. 30% above 10Mbps (55% increase) and 16% >15Mbps, (95% increase)
- New Zealand averages 12.9Mbps, a 39%increase YoY. 25% above 15Mbps (134% increase), 45% above 10Mbps (75% increase)
- South Korea again had the highest average connection speed globally at 26.1Mbps.
- At 26.7Mbps, the District of Columbia led the United States in average connection speed.
- Global 4, 10, 15 and 25Mbps 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% of its content requests to Akamai coming over IPv6, Belgium maintained its significant global lead in IPv6 adoption with a 20% QoQ 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).
