Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its Second Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics such as average and peak connection speed and mobile broadband speeds. Much of the report focuses attack traffic on the United States, but parts examine connectivity in larger African economies.

The data from African nations is very limited and perhaps less accurate than that for the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. For example, average broadband speeds in most nations appear high (from 0.6 Mbps to 2.5 Mbps). Also, the report finds average connection speeds to be higher in Cote d’Ivoire than in Kenya and peak connection speeds in Lesotho to be 7 Mbps. Still, quarterly and yearly trends are more relevant.

{Akamai}

Notes:

• Relatively few DDoS attacks originate from Africa
• Tanzania and Mozambique saw more than 100% growth in quarterly IP counts (the driver of growth is not immediately clear)
• Angola and Sudan saw over 100-300% yearly IP count growth
• Africa will not run out of IPv4 addresses until 2020 due to slow rates of assignment
• Sudan saw a 93% quarterly increase in average connection speed (to 2.1 Mbps)
• Cote d’Ivoire had a 262% yearly increase in average connection speed (to 1.6 Mbps)
• Kenya‘s average connection speed dropped by 42% to 1.0 Mbps
• South Africa had an average connection speed of 2.3 Mbps (up by 26% annually)
• Libya still has the lowest average connection speed of any country in the report (0.6 Mbps) with 10% growth
• Peak connection speeds grew by 0.3% for Cote d’Ivoire (to a strong 16.7 Mbps) and by 53% in Lesotho (to 7.0 Mbps)
• Kenya recorded the lowest peak connection speed of any nation monitored with 4.5 Mbps
• South Africa‘s peak speed stood at 8.3 Mbps after increasing by 50% year-over-year
• In South Africa, 1.6% of internet users have greater than a 10 Mbps connection (up by 50% year-over-year, but down slightly versus the prior quarter. Around 8% of South African broadband users have greater than 4 Mbps connectivity
• The broadband adoption in Morocco doubled quarterly, from 6% to 12%
• Looking at average mobile speeds, Egypt is at 1.2 Mbps (9.1 Mbps peak); Morocco is at 1.6 Mbps (14.3 Mbps peak); South Africa is at 0.5 Mbps (2.2 Mbps peak)
• Sudatel’s June 29th internet outage in Sudan was mentioned as well

Note: Data is gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which doesn’t necessarily represent actual speeds on the ground. But, the data is consistently a solid benchmark.