South Africa ranks badly against other countries when it comes to connectivity and connection speeds, according to Akamai's latest quarterly State of the Internet Report.
Akamai, which provides security, cloud and networking solutions, used its global intelligent platform to gather "massive" amounts of data covering issues such as connection speeds, attack traffic, network connectivity and traffic platforms. The latest report includes data covering attack traffic and Internet connection speeds/broadband adoption across both fixed and mobile networks, as well as trends.
In the second quarter - the period covered by its report - the global average connection speed grew 21% to 4.6Mbps and the global average peak connection speed grew 20%, reaching 25.4Mbps, it says. South Korea continued to have the highest average connection speed at 24.6Mbps but Hong Kong had the highest average peak connection speed at 73.9Mbps, the report adds.
In the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, South Africa had the lowest average peak fixed connection, even after seeing the largest quarter-on-quarter change, at 31%, says Akamai. The country recorded an average speed of 3Mbps, a 59% year-on-year gain.
Globally, high broadband (faster than 10Mbps) adoption grew 12% to reach 23%, with South Korea remaining the country with the highest level of high broadband adoption, at 78%. Adoption across the globe of broadband faster than 4Mbps grew 5.6% quarter-on-quarter to 59%.
Locally, only 2.5% of connections tested by Akamai were faster than 10Mbps, while 13% were faster than 4Mbps, a 66% improvement year-on-year.
Average mobile connection speeds (aggregated at a country level) ranged from a high of 15.2Mbps in South Korea, down to a low of 0.9Mbps in Vietnam. Average peak mobile connection speeds ranged from 108Mbps in Australia, down to 4.7Mbps in Vietnam.
In South Africa, the average mobile broadband speed is 1.8Mbps, with a peak of 6.1Mbps, notes the report. Some 5.5% of connections are faster than 4Mbps.
Share