Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its Second 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 mobile broadband speeds. Although the meat of the report covers global and U.S. developments, Africa certainly gets its share of attention.

{Akamai}

Highlights:

• The global average connection speed is now 3.0 Mbps.
• Average connection speeds in Kenya increased by 227% quarter-over-quarter to 1.8 Mbps. Peak speeds were 7.2 Mbps.
• Year-over-year declines in connection speed were found in 34 countries, including Libya (69% decline to 0.5 Mbps).
• In May, the government of Kenya invited South Sudan to connect to fiber optic cables in Kenya. Seacom announced plans to double its fiber capacity by the end of the year.
• Cote d’Ivoire showed the lowest average connection speed, down 29% from Q1 (0.4 Mbps).
• In Tanzania, peak connection speeds saw a slight decline to 5.6 Mbps.
• The prevalence of connections of 10 Mbps or greater in South Africa increased by 56%. Now, 1.1% of South African connections are at this speed.
• Broadband connectivity adoption (speeds of 4+ Mbps) more than doubled quarter-over-quarter in both Kenya and Morocco.
• South Africa had an average connection speed of 1.8 Mbps (up 19% year-over-year).
• Based on limited data from a single mobile provider in each nation, Egypt has an average connection speed of 677 kbps, Morocco 1.12 Mbps, Nigeria 340 kbps, South Africa 552 kbps. Peak speeds range from 5x to 19x the average.

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.