Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its First Quarter, 2014 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics such as connection speeds, attack traffic, and network connectivity issues. Much of the focus is on the United States and Europe. Still, many African countries are mentioned but absolute speeds should be taken with a grain of salt. Relative trends are likely more useful as they describe the broader availability of bandwidth.

The global average connection speed grew to nearly 2% last quarter to 3.9 Mbps with a peak speed of 21 Mbps (which was slightly down over last quarter). The global rate of high speed broadband adoption (deemed greater than 10 Mbps) grew to 21%. Mobile broadband speeds still fluctuate and speeds varied greatly by country and network. All in all, 138 countries/regions qualified for inclusion in this quarter’s report.

{Akamai}

African fixed broadband notes for Jan-Mar 2014:

• Sudan saw a nearly 200% year-over-year increase in average connection speed. Sudan also had the highest quarterly increase in average peak connection speed at +76% (to 13.4 Mbps). It’s not clear what cable became operational to allow such additional fibre capacity.
• Average connection speed declined by 6% year-over-year in Libya (to 0.5 Mbps). Peak connection speed in Libya declined by 61% year-over-year to 6.2 Mbps.
• Cameroon, Botswana, and Libya were three of six measured countries to have average connection speeds of less than 1 Mbps.
• Kenya realized a 99% year-over-year increase in peak connection speed.
• South Africa experienced an annual decline in the rate of high broadband adoption (>10 Mbps) – down to 1.4%. Reportedly 0.8% of South Africa has a connection of at least 15 Mbps. South Africa saw an 11% quarterly increase in average connection speed (to 2.6 Mbps).
• Questionably, Sudan showed an annual 5,926% increase in broadband (>4 Mbps) adoption and Kenya experienced 1,100% growth to 4.9% overall broadband adoption.

African mobile broadband notes for Jan-Mar 2014:

• Egypt has an average connection speed of 2.0 Mbps; Morocco 1.8 Mbps; South Africa 1.7 Mbps
• In South Africa, 4.8% of connections are above 4 Mbps; Egypt 2.5%; Morocco 1.1%

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.