Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its Fourth Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics such as average and peak connection speed and mobile broadband speeds.

Although the meat of the report covers global and U.S. developments, Africa again gets its share of attention for its rapid broadband growth. Unfortunately, data is limited to the largest nations, and even then, is heavy on traditional fixed broadband speeds instead of mobile. Relatively few Africans use fixed broadband; not just because it is slow, but because of the heavy engagement with mobile devices. Also note that Akamai is no longer tracking data for connections slower than 256 kbps and that mobile broadband data only is given for four African countries.

Africa’s peak connection speeds have increased more slowly than other regions. {Akamai}

Highlights:

• The global average connection speed is now 2.9 Mbps.
• Cote d’Ivoire experienced 23% average connection speed growth from Q3 to Q4.
• Kenya saw a 239% annual increase in average connection speed.
• Libya still has the lowest average connection speed of all 125 countries in the report (0.6 Mbps). The speed grew by only 7.4% in 3 months.
• Tanzania and Cameroon saw slight decreases in average peak connection speeds.
• The “high broadband” (>10 Mbps) adoption rate in South Africa grew by by 490% on a yearly basis.
• Kenya‘s broadband (>4 Mbps) adoption level increased by a massive 2,971% year-over-year. The reasons given include tech investment and greater access to submarine cables.
• The average connection speed in South Africa is 2.1 Mbps (up by 41% YoY). About 1.6% of connections are faster than 10 Mbps. 8% are faster than 4 Mbps.
• In Sudan, the average connection speed is 0.9 Mbps, with a peak of 7 Mbps. Only 0.3% of connections are faster than 4 Mbps.
• Average mobile speeds were collected for Egypt (939 kbps), Morocco (1265 kbps), Nigeria (345 kbps), and South Africa (554 kbps). Peak speeds were in the 3-10 Mbps range.
• As a region, Africa lags the world in terms of both weighted average connection speed and weighted peak connection speed.
• In the past five years, Africa’s peak speeds have grown by 136% which is strong but still lags all other regions (ie. South America’s growth was 378%).
• Africa’s broadband adoption rate stands at 4.8%.

Note: Data is gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which doesn’t necessarily represent actual speeds on the ground. Nor does it include data from countries with less web traffic. But, the data is consistently a solid benchmark.