To completely destroy any delusions of grandeur that we may have about the state of Internet connectivity in India, Akamai has released its State of the Internet report for the 4th quarter of 2011. We’ve picked out the nuggets from the report for your perusal below. If you’ve ever wondered what was the average speed of Internet connectivity in India, or the average peak Internet speed in India, or even about the countries from which the most Internet attacks originate – and how India is placed in that list – you need to look no further. The tables below should suffice. If you like reading lengthy reports and you are starved for details on Internet connectivity worldwide, Akamai’s report is available at the source link at the end of this article.

Attack Traffic

India places 9th in the list of top countries from which attack traffic originates. Reassuringly, attack traffic fell from 3.7% in the third quarter of 2011 to 3% in the 4th quarter, but this is one list that we want to be at the bottom of – not in the top ten.

Average Connection Speed

With an average connection speed of 0.9 Mbps, India, as the title of this article states, places 114th globally as far as Internet connectivity speeds are concerned. Apparently, this is an 8.6% increase over the same quarter of the previous year, so we should be happy – but diving deeper into Akamai’s report, we find that the average connection speed in India has stayed at around the 800-900 Kbps range for the past four years (as long as Akamai has been collecting this data).

The Peak Connection Speed tablet below lists the maximum Internet speed capacities of the connections available in India, so this gives us a better understanding of the average Internet connection speed that individuals/organisations are opting for – 5.9 Mbps. So if the peak speed of your Internet connection is below 5.9 Mbps, your Internet connection speed is below the average peak connection speed for a broadband connection in India.

Broadband Adoption

With just 8.4 percentage of the country’s Internet connections being above 2 Mbps, and only 0.5 % of the connections being above 5 Mbps speeds, broadband adoption in the country is low. Moreover, we have the unenviable distinction along with the Philippines of being the only two countries with less than 10% 2 Mbps connections and less than 1% 5 Mbps connections in the Asia Pacific region.

Obviously, having very low levels of broadband adoption conversely means that there’s plenty of people in the country with very slow connections. Globally, we’re the fifth largest country with Internet connections below 256 Kbps speed (incidentally, 256 Kbps is what TRAI defines as “broadband” in India). 27% of the Internet connections in our country are below this 256 Kbps connection speed. On the bright side, it’s nice to know that 73% of our country’s Internet connections are either 256 Kbps or higher speeds. If you must know, we take the top spot in the Asia Pacific region for the most percentage of below 256 Kbps connections.

Mobile Connectivity

The situation with mobile connectivity in India seems brighter, with the penetration of 3G for mobile phones and high-speed CDMA-based Internet devices. The average connection speed was over 1.5 Mbps, with the peak connection speed average well over 9 Mbps. However, with the rarity of legal music and video content for download in India and the high cost of mobile data traffic, we Indians apparently download an average of just over 200 MB each month.

All these tables seem to paint India’s Internet connectivity abilities in a bad light, when compared to the rest of the world. We can only hope and pine for the day when India would top lists other than the attack traffic or the lowest Internet speeds lists.

Via: The Verge

Source: Akamai