Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its First Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics such as average and peak connection speed, origins of attack traffic, IPv6 adoption and recently, mobile broadband speeds. Although the meat of the report covers global and U.S. developments, Africa certainly gets its share of attention. It’s worth noting that Akamai now defines true broadband as 4 Mbps (was 2 Mbps) and has removed narrowband (less than 256 kbps) from its radar.

Notes:

• Under 1.5% of attack traffic emanated from Africa (roughly the same as the previous quarter). (6)
• After unexpectedly dropping at the end of 2011, the global average connection speed grew by 14% from last quarter, to 2.6 Mbps. (13)
• Libya‘s connection speed grew the most of any country – by 75% to 0.5 Mbps. Libya still has the slowest connection speed of any country in the report. (14) Year-over-year, Libya’s peak connection speed grew by 213% (to 3.8 Mbps). (15)
• Sudan‘s peak connection speed grew by 56% (to 8.5 Mbps). (14) The average connection speed in Sudan is 0.9 Mbps. Only 0.2% of connections were greater than 4 Mbps. (35)
• Tanzania is one of 5 countries with a noted decline in average peak connection speed – down 21% to 5.1 Mbps. (15)
• South Africa experienced a 149% quarterly increase in high broadband (>10 Mbps) adoption. Still, adoption only stands at 0.7%. (15)
• In Egypt, broadband adoption increased by over 5x year-over-year. (16) Egypt boasts a 1.3 Mbps average connection speed and 7.6 Mbps peak connection speed. 0.1% of connections are above 10 Mbps and 4.6% are greater than 4 Mbps. (35)
• The average connection speed in Mauritius grew by only 0.6%. (14)
• Mobile connectivity: Average connection speeds are listed for 4 large African nations – Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. Average speeds (in descending order) range from 996 kbps in Morocco to 592 kbps in Egypt to 496 kbps in South Africa to 322 kbps in Nigeria. (30) Peak speeds range from 4x to 18x that of average speeds!

Figure 23: Q1 2012 Average and Average Peak Connection Speed per Month by Mobile Provider for Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa. {Akamai}

There was no mention of Guinea-Bissau, which in Q4 2011 reportedly had the 22% quarterly growth in peak connection speed. Moreover, it is unfortunate that Akamai removed narrowband statistics from the report since Africa is a key region where such numbers are still significant.

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.