Akami just published the results of a survey which monitored 604 million unique IP addresses from 238 countries and regions.
Asia dominated this contest with South Korea emerging top with an average 13.8Mbps connection speed. This was closely followed by Hong Kong with 10Mbps then Japan at 8.9Mbps.
The UK had a shocker and trailed at 25th in the world with an average speed of just 5Mbps. It didn’t even fair well in Europe coming 15 out of the 22 countries surveyed.
The Netherlands won the contest in Europe with average speeds of 8.5Mbps. In addition the Netherlands came top with regards to having ‘higher broadband.’ This refers to connections higher than 5Mbps. In the Netherlands 68% of connections were in this bracket.
The UK again fell flat in this respect with just 30% of the population having access to ‘higher broadband.’ This is particularly shameful as 7 of the top 10 were in Europe!
Positive was the fact that the average global broadband speed has improved by 21% to 2.6Mbps. In the UK speeds have increased by 28% in the last 12 months. However this has not improved in the last quarter, whereas 80 other countries/regions saw their connection speeds increase by 10% within this period.
It is not just the online backup and disaster recovery market which would benefit from more modern internet speeds, it’s every industry. The UK needs to double its efforts to stay up to date.