Akamai’s quarterly The State of the Internet study has become a valued measure of the proliferation of the worldwide web over the past five years. Its latest edition, covering the last quarter of 2012, was released last week.

The most recent State of the Internet report recorded over 1 billion web users worldwide, observing that the number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses increased by 9.8% during 2012.

Akamai noted that global data traffic from mobile devices doubled during 2012, while voice traffic on the same devices grew by only 3% over the same period. The report also observed that China is now the source of 41% of all denial-of-service ‘attack traffic’ on the internet, far ahead of second-placed United States (10%).

The report also records average  download speeds for countries around the world, based on traffic through Akamai’s own servers. Australia recorded average speeds of 4.2 megabits per second, New Zealand 4.0 Mbps and Indonesia 1.4 Mbps. South Korea had the world’s fastest average download speed (14.0 Mbps) in Q4 2012.

While Pacific countries are not singled out in the report itself, Business Advantage PNG has been able to obtain figures directly from Akamai regarding them. Akamai warns the figures for some countries below (marked thus *), should be taken with a ‘grain of salt’ due to the sample being ‘insufficiently large to make the measurements for those countries statistically meaningful.’

Average connection speeds in the Pacific?

Country/territory Story continues after advertisment...	Average connection speed (kilobits per second)
Vanuatu*	3947 (3.9 Mbps)
New Caledonia	3416 (3.4 Mbps)
Tonga*	1483 (1.5 Mbps)
French Polynesia	1350 (1.3 Mbps)
Fiji	1328 (1.3 Mbps)
Samoa*	1092 (1.1 Mbps)
Papua New Guinea*	827 (0.8 Mbps)
Timor Leste*	467 (0.5 Mbps)
Solomon Islands*	420 (0.4 Mbps)

Source: Akamai. * Data for these countries not statistically meaningful.