Riverside, CA the best-connected city in the US

The most recent State of the Internet report from US firm Akamai Technologies, a provider of cloud optimisation services, has found (amongst other things) that the global average internet connection speed increased 23 per cent on an annual basis in the first quarter of this year to reach 2.1Mbps.

The report’s findings were extracted from the globally-distributed Akamai Internet Platform, which is estimated to carry up to 30 per cent of worldwide web traffic on any given day.

Over 584 million unique IP addresses from 237 countries/regions connected to the Akamai Internet Platform in the first quarter of this year, up 5.2 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2010 and up 20 per cent from one year previously.

The top ten countries or regions accounted for almost 70 per cent of total IP addresses in the period – a similar proportion to the previous quarter. Italy joined the top ten with an 11 per cent sequential growth in the number of unique IP addresses in the first quarter of this year, while Canada fell off the list of the top ten.

Asia dominated the list of the 100 cities worldwide featuring the fastest average connection speeds, with Japan providing 61 of them and South Korea accounting for five. The Norwegian city of Lyse was found to be the best-connected city in Europe, being ranked 33 out 100, whilst 18 US cities made the list, with the Californian city of Riverside ranking as the fastest US city (#39).

The report also found a dwindling number of “narrowband” or low-speed internet connections being made to the Akamai platform, defined as connections being made at speeds slower than 256Kbps. Under this definition, the report showed global adoption of narrowband decreased by 15 per cent in the first quarter of this year and accounted for only 3.3 per cent of all connections by the end of March. France had the lowest narrowband adoption rate worldwide at 0.3 per cent.