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The Internet Technology

The Net (According To Akamai) 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
The Installer quotes a gizmag story saying "Akamai might not be a household name but between 15 to 30 percent of the world's Web traffic is carried on the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's internet platform at any given time. Using data gathered by software constantly monitoring internet conditions via the company's nearly 100,000 servers deployed in 72 countries and spanning most of the networks within the internet, Akamai creates its quarterly State of the internet report. The report provides some interesting facts and figures, such as regions with the slowest and fastest connection speeds, broadband adoption rates and the origins of attack traffic."
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The Net (According To Akamai) More

The Net (According To Akamai)

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  • I hate slideshows (Score:4, Informative)

    by rbrausse ( 1319883 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @11:12AM (#36897000)

    all the pictures in the gizmag slideshow can be downloaded as one handy zip file [akamai.com].

  • The most likely reason Myanmar is number one is most likely due to China....

    With the large influx of Chinese influence in Myanmar (http://www.asiapacificms.com/articles/myanmar_influence/) this past year and before, I'm not surprised they have become number one. Maybe China is out-sourcing their hackers over to there so as to draw attention away from China and simply grow their cyber-attack force.

    I wouldn't be surprised if our government knows about this....

  • Reg Required (Score:4, Informative)

    by uncledrax ( 112438 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @11:33AM (#36897350) Homepage

    The ACTUAL report (and archives), but behind a reg-wall: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ [akamai.com]

  • Speed vs. Usage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by s31523 ( 926314 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @11:35AM (#36897410)
    I find it interesting that the U.S. is number 1 in usage (most unique IP's), but 14th in average connection speed. I would have thought the U.S. would have been a little bit better (speed-wise). China is #2 in both usage and speed. Interesting... Yet another area China will soon dominate the U.S. in (once they take the top spot in usage).
    • China didn't start with a full copper network. US did. Early adoption isn't great for this.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's a convenient scapegoat, but not really an excuse.

        The argument is that there was a lot of money invested in the original infrastructure. Corporations (the telecoms, cable and other companies) need time to re-coup their investment in these technologies.

        The problem with this argument is that the corporations are no longer competing, just doing all they can to keep the status quo. This means they legislate against new technologies. Need spectrum for a new technology? Too bad for you because these legacy

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )

          Emerging economies will depend upon high speed Internet. The fact that the pioneer in almost all of this technology is now dropping to 14th and 15th is fully the fault of corporations artificially maintaining the status quo.

          And the voters who let them and get allergic reactions when anyone suggests that the government should regulate businesses.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • ~There's always some excuse. Europe had copper lines shoved down in old tight passages and they managed. Oh of course there will be the excuse that European countries are so tiny!. But if you compare states with similar densities they still come up short against a lot of European countries. The US just isn't interested in being the best at anything and seems quite happy with companies maximising profits at the consumer's expense.
        • Europe was also very far behind on adoption for broadband. While I was enjoying unlimited cable internet and DSL here in 2000, when I spent the summer in Britain and France laughing at their advertising for hourly dialup.
          • Yep on dial-up Europe was behind. It was always expensive & per minute and 2000 and yeah broadband would have only been starting off around that time. I believe NTL would been just offering cable internet in villages outside of Cambridge. But one thing they did was invest heavily and grew quite quickly.

            I think Europe benefits by having more competition. Had things been left to only BT the UK would probably still be on 1 mb broadband and the reason there is more competition because the government step

      • Not the real issue. How much do you think it takes to run fiber optic cable 2 feet to the next subscriber in a densely populated country like China?

        • That is the second factor involved. South Korea, for instance, has one of the top average offerings for consumers for speed. Very dense and didn't modernize that infrastructure until very recently.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          About as much as for a high rise apartment in New York?

          • I don't know the first thing about Chinese building codes, but comparing stereotypes to stereotypes...

            --New York high-rises would likely be SO dense with computing devices that you'd likely need to invest in half a central office in the basement of the high-rise just to handle the backhaul. You'd need a stack of permits so high you'd likely need a consulting firm just to oversee that they're followed. You'd need to convince the building owners to let you run cable in the building, and those guys are usually

      • To be honest I've never understood this argument. Is it that companies haven't made their returns on the copper yet, companies find the path of least resistance to be less speedy than for new infrastructure, or that these markets are in greater flux creating more competition which spurs innovation. Of course, it could be something else, but this is what came to my air bubble head just now.

        • No, it's more that if it's not broke, don't fix it. The infrastructure is already there, the people are already customers, so why spend billions tearing it all out to replace with fiber?

    • Why do I care about the speed? It's fast enough, faster isn't going to help me.

      • But it's not fast enough. It's hindering our use of the net for more cutting edge use. I'm lucky enough to have a 5mbps connection which is faster than much of the rest of the country, but I'm sitting here only a few miles from an IXP and Qwest is saying that they're not going to be upgrading the connection speeds of much of the city. I'm lucky in my neighborhood, I know of at least two other neighborhoods where the peak connection they offer is 1.5mbps.

        Comcast is more or less a non-option as they cheat on

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          As much as people whine and complain about ComCast I have yet to see any speed cheating. I get a consistent 15mb+ pretty much anywhere I go that supports that speed (BTW this is in Memphis, TN and upper MS. I also do my own tests to verify anything I see on SpeedTest). That is not cheating if the remote site can't keep up with your speed so I don't know where you are getting this cheating from. I get a consistent 50ms or less ping to most places in the ConUS and even if the pipe is shared in my neighborhood

        • Weird...

          I've lived in Connecticut and now live in fairly rural Pennsylvania. I have a 6mb/s connection, but usually far exceed that in speedtests. Granted my mother-in-law is stuck with a 1mb/s wireless cell service for her internet. But seriously, I'm not even paying for the higher data speeds.

          Most urbarn/suburban areas now offer 6mb/s in America.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swb ( 14022 )

          I'm no fan of the telecommunications/infotainment oligarchy, but 10 years ago I paid $85/month for 768k/768k DSL and one static IP. That's $112 in current purchasing power.

          I now pay $69 for 10m/3m with 5 static IPs. That's a 33% reduction in price for nearly 7 times the product.

          How is that not an improvement?

    • It's a sad story. After successfully inventing the thing, and scoring some sweet IP blocks, we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market, with predictably tepid results.

      • ...we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market...

        Who's "we"? Most Americans will eagerly point out how little choice we have in phone and Internet service, and how we're being vastly overcharged and vastly underserviced. The only people who seems to not be listening are regulators and politicians. No one else is pretending that America's current telecom situation is anything other than unmitigated crap.

    • I find it interesting that the U.S. is number 1 in usage (most unique IP's), but 14th in average connection speed. I would have thought the U.S. would have been a little bit better (speed-wise). China is #2 in both usage and speed. Interesting... Yet another area China will soon dominate the U.S. in (once they take the top spot in usage).

      To me the most surprising thing was that U.S. average speed wasn't nearly as bad as my impression of it has been lately. Sure, South Korea has a significant advantage at ~14 mbps average, but other than that outlier the other nations ahead of the U.S. are in the 5.6-9 mbps range. Faster, but not really materially so - I don't think there is a lot you can do at 9 mbps that you can't do at 5.2 mbps. Yes, we still need to invest in faster speeds and expanding availability to more people, but at least from this

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        I was also surprised not to see Finland in the top 10 - it seems like every time there is a discussion of broadband access and speeds someone brings up Finland as a shining example of good broadband availability in a relatively sparsely populated nation; apparently, at least from Akamai's view of the 'net, availability (or at least uptake) isn't nearly as extensive as some have suggested.

        ... or it's fast enough and with enough local content that they don't need Akamai as badly.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Here's my experience with Korean vs American internet speeds. My internet speed in Korea was something like 60mbps average for less than $40 per month with no bandwidth cap as far as I knew, and I downloaded a lot (rough testing with steam downloads- 6-8 megabytes per second, and torrents-similar speeds. Sites like megaupload were around 12-24mbps). I didn't really notice speed drops during busy times either, like I've noticed with Comcast in the U.S. I think the equivalent of that in the US costs about

      • "I was also surprised not to see Finland in the top 10 - it seems like every time there is a discussion of broadband access and speeds someone brings up Finland as a shining example of good broadband availability in a relatively sparsely populated nation; apparently, at least from Akamai's view of the 'net, availability (or at least uptake) isn't nearly as extensive as some have suggested" Akamai do not serve the nordic countries very well. No local servers, and I suspect that they deliberately cap bandwid

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alen ( 225700 )

      blame flyover country

      the coasts and major cities are just as fast as asia. all the people who live next to cows with their sub 1mbps connections bring everyone else down. a lot of places are not served by cable or they don't want cable TV leaving them with DSL. even a lot of people in the cities have satellite TV and the cheapest DSL for internet at $10 a month

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      I find it interesting that the U.S. is number 1 in usage (most unique IP's), but 14th in average connection speed. I would have thought the U.S. would have been a little bit better (speed-wise).

      I'm not surprised. The only way the US has been able to stay high up on the charts of broadband connectivity is by redefining broadband to a much lower standard than the rest of the world.

      The US has been surpassed technologically by quite a few countries by now. I think the rest of the world accelerated to a quick pace in the 80s that the US just hasn't been able to keep up with. I remember when I moved to the US in '99, I thought "Cassette tapes? Pagers? Cheques for payment? 4:3 TV? No broadband? D

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Pope ( 17780 )

        And now, 12 years later, you still find pagers and cassette tapes even though they're less common, most TV is still 4:3, and people still use cheques for payment. And I still can't get broadband where I live. 1500/256 DSL or 0-15000/0-512 cable (averaging at 3 Mbps / 150 Mps) is the best I can get.

        3Mbps? That is broadband.

        PS every new TV show I watch is 16:9, so I don't know where you're coming from.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )

          3Mbps? That is broadband.

          No, it isn't. By the CCITT definition, you need to be faster than PRI rate, both ways. I.e. it's not enough to have a typical download speed exceeding T1 speeds if the typical upload speed is only a fraction of that. That won't let you do video-conferencing, for example, or use a remote desktop in any meaningful way (X11 lbx was nice to get around that)

          Also, you should not measure the maximum speed, but the CIR. Which for cable is zero. A 0-8 Mbps line is not broadband, but a 2 Mbps line is.

    • 1) Does the study record simply the speed of connection? Because I highly doubt all of China's citizens have access to personal internet connection. Not every American does, but it's pretty darn high. It's easier to have a high avg speed if only a select portion of the populace has access.

      2) Usually, these studies fail to account for geography. For example, a densely populated modern nation like Japan or Hong Kong will score high because most of their population is within a small region and thus less infra

  • The Net? (Score:3)

    by bhcompy ( 1877290 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @11:43AM (#36897532)
    Akamai are the Praetorians? Do they hide pi symbols on all of the websites they control?

  • I can only say nothing.

  • Noscript! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And Akamai was why I installed Noscript. Any given heavy traffic site would ~mostly load, but be 'waiting' on akamai links to finish, thus 'slowing down' my internet usage. Yes, I'm using generalities here, but the point remains. I don't need to see every damn ad and have the counters at akamai log it. For a while there, I was damning them daily. These days? Not so much.

    Thanks Noscript! And adblock! And Flashblock!

  • Wow. The US has the most users but speeds barely rank in the top 40 with other nations. I wonder who has the greediest bastards owning the ISPs.

    • I don't have any references to show but I have lived in 3 different continents and multiple countries (so my experiance is what I am referencing). The avarage american city/county/state is by far exceedingly more spread out than any town/country I have ever lived in (outside the US) We build houses on acres of land while many countries have a fraction of our property sizes. The reason I say all that is it is a whole lot simpler/easier to get connections to 100's or 1000's of homes in non US countries then i

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Do you think an ISP would be willing to spend 1000s of dollars to connect 2/3 rural homes in the country? I doubt it.

        Do you think ISPs were required to spend their own money in the first place? Of course not. Over here in the Yoo Ess Eh, our slimy politicians tend to grant monopoly/cartel statuses to a select few providers per town, city, et cetera. In return, we're supposed to get decent infrastructure out of the deal. We don't, and the cuntdribblers we elect don't really give a rat's ass, since they've already received their personal payoff.

        And let's not even go in to who it was who paid for the US's telephone infr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbc ( 135354 )

        So explain to me why, when I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, on the tiniest lot I have ever had for any house I ever lived in, why is it that I can't get a good connection for a reasonable price? I have DSL, last mile by PacBell (because it has to be), but ISP is Sonic.net (because Sonic is mega-clueful and PacBell is a pack of greedy dipshits). But my DSL rates are not all that great. By your logic, if *anyplace* should be able to get a good connection with competition among providers it should be

      • The problem with that line of thought is that our high density areas do poorly when compared to other countries.

  • Oh that's right, we suck. We were on one, but got bumped... by Spain. Spain!

  • Keep in mind that this report throws wired and wireless connections together.
    Imagine a modern with one 100mbit connection to the family PC and 5 mobile phones (barely 4mbit) would have an average connection speed of only 20mbit.

  • I would like to know how they figure that many of the US states have over 97% of the people connected to high speed, when I know for a fact that large portions of Arkansas and Oklahoma don't have anything higher than dial-up available(unless you count satellite*). I know that one of the GOV reports was playing games with the numbers(if zip code 12345 has high speed to one house, then the whole area has high speed). Just because a larger town in the middle of a zip code has high speed, the suburbs(or furth

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