Internet of things grows 21%

The latest State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies has revealed that there were 21 per cent more unique IP addresses in the second quarter of this year than 12 months previously.

There were over 604 million unique IP addresses from 238 countries and regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform in the three months to June 2011 – representing a 3.4 per cent increase from the first quarter of this year and a 21 per cent increase from 12 months previously. The Akamai Intelligent Platform is estimated to serve as much as 30 per cent of the world’s Internet traffic at any one time.

Brazil logged the greatest quarterly growth in terms of unique IPv4 addresses for a country in the top ten list for the number of unique IPv4 addresses, growing nine per cent to reach over 15 million. Japan came a close second with 8.7 per cent quarterly growth to reach nearly 45 million IP addresses.

For European countries in the top ten in terms of number of unique IPv4 addresses, Italy had the greatest quarterly gain at 5.4 per cent to reach in excess of 14mn IP addresses, while Germany grew just 0.4 per cent and remained just below 35 million IP addresses. Stateside, the US managed to add just 0.6 per cent to its unique IP address count, remaining just below 143.5 million IP addresses.

The report confirms that many markets are now moving to high-speed broadband connections: 27 per cent of all connections to the Akamai Intelligence Platform were made at high broadband speeds (defined as being over 5Mbps).

Taking the top spot in terms of high-speed broadband adoption is the Netherlands, with 68 per cent of its connections to Akamai being made at over 5Mbps. Hong Kong and South Korea achieved 59 per cent and 58 per cent respectively. Within the list of top ten countries for adoption of high-speed broadband, seven are in Europe.

Mobile broadband connection speeds also continued to increase in the second quarter of this year, with the average measured connection speed for known mobile providers worldwide ranging from a high of slightly over 5Mbps to a low of 209Kbps. Approximately three-quarters of the surveyed providers had average connection speeds above 1Mbps.

Peak speeds on an individual provider basis however were much higher: out of the 108 mobile providers worldwide which Akamai analysed, the report found a high of 23.4Mbps as the fastest and a low of 1.2Mbps. Of all such mobile providers, three boasted average peak connection speeds above 20Mbps, while 27 achieved average connection speeds above 10Mbps, and 47 recorded average peak connection speeds greater than 5Mbps.

Mobile broadband consumption figures remained fairly consistent between the first and second quarter of this year, according to the report: users at ten of the surveyed mobile providers consumed an average of 1 GB or more per month from the Akamai platform, while users at 74 of the surveyed providers consumed greater than 100MB per month, and users at the remaining 20 providers consumed less than 100MB per month.