Yesterday, Akamai Technologies, a leader in content delivery network services, released its Third Quarter, 2015 State of the Internet Report. The main things the report looked at were global connection speed, the exhaustion of IPv4, and the adoption of IPv6 (which begs the question: what happened to IPv5?).
So what exactly did the study find? Let’s take a look at some of the numbers (and check out the fun interactive visuals if reading is just too hard).
Global Average Connection Speeds and Global Broadband Connectivity
- Global average connection speed increased slightly (0.2 percent) to 5.1 Mbps from the second quarter, accounting for a 14 percent increase year-over-year.
- South Korea had the top average connection speed at 20.5 Mbps, despite a year-over-year drop of 19 percent since the third quarter of 2014.
- Globally, 5.2 percent of unique IP addresses connected to Akamai at average speeds of at least 25 Mbps, a 6.3 percent increase over the previous quarter. Year-over-year, global 25 Mbps adoption increased by 15 percent, in contrast to the 0.5 percent yearly decrease seen in the second quarter.
- Three of the top 10 countries/regions – South Korea (24 percent adoption), Hong Kong (14 percent adoption), and Japan (13 percent adoption) – saw yearly declines, losing 37 percent, 15 percent, and 2.5 percent, respectively.
- In the U.S., 10 states had 10 percent or more of unique IP addresses connected to Akamai at average speeds of at least 25 Mbps, with the District of Columbia holding the top spot at 22 percent adoption.
- The global percentage of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai that met the 4 Mbps broadband speed threshold increased 2.7 percent to 65 percent. Year-over-year growth was 9.8 percent.
IPv4 and IPv6
- The number of unique, worldwide IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai increased by about 4.8 million in the third quarter.
- The U.K. saw IPv4 counts hold steady, while the U.S. saw a small 0.5 percent decline from the second quarter.
- On a global basis, close to 60 percentof the countries/regions saw a quarter-over-quarter increase in unique IPv4 address counts in the third quarter, compared with roughly half in the second quarter
- European countries continued to dominate the top 10 countries/regions, taking eight of the top 10 spots with the largest percentage of content requests made to Akamai over IPv6 in the third quarter of 2015.
“While we did observe an increase in the number of unique IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai, the third quarter of 2015 saw the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for North America completely exhaust its available inventory of IPv4 address space,” noted David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report, in a statement. “The continued depletion of IPv4 space, in both North America and around the world, should further spur organizations to expand or accelerate their own IPv6 adoption, particularly as the cost of obtaining IPv4 address space may rise as scarcity increases.”
The report compiled data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform™, which is the world’s largest cloud-based platform for securely distributing and accelerating web content, enterprise applications and video. Their software resides on over 175,000 servers in more than 1,300 networks in 100+ countries.