Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading cloud platform, recently released its Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics such as connection speeds, attack traffic, network connectivity issues, and IPv6 growth/transition progress, as well as traffic patterns across leading Web properties and digital media providers. Much of the focus is on the United States and Europe, but the larger African economies are always mentioned too.

The global average connection speed grew over 5% last quarter to nearly 4 Mbps with a massive average peak speed of 23 Mbps. The global rate of high speed broadband adoption (deemed greater than 10 Mbps) remains low at 1.6%. Mobile broadband speeds still fluctuate and speeds varied greatly by country and network. All in all, 83 countries/regions qualified for inclusion in this quarter’s report.

{Akamai}

African broadband notes for Oct-Dec 2013:

• Relatively few DDoS attacks originate from Africa compared with other continents
  
• AFRINIC delegated over 3 million IPv4 addresses (5% of its pool space) – one million went to Telecom Algeria and 260,000 to Telkom SA
• Kenya‘s average connection speed increased by 50% (to 1.9 Mbps)
• Average connection speed in Tanzania fell by 24% (to 1.0 Mbps)
• The island of Réunion saw a 164% year-over-year increase in connection speed (to 6.4 Mbps)
• Year-over-year, Lesotho witnessed a greater than 20% decline in both average and peak connection speed (average speed to 1.4 Mbps after being unusually high last report)
• Cameroon had one of the lowest observed average connection speeds at 0.9 Mbps, but Libya was even lower at 0.6 Mbps (unchanged over the past two quarters)
• Peak speeds in Libya increased, however, notching 179% quarterly growth (to 15.8 Mbps)
• Mozambique observed a yearly decline in peak connection speed
• South Africa reportedly saw a year-over-year drop in the level of high broadband (> 10 Mbps) adoption – to 1.3% overall adoption but broadband (> 4 Mbps) grew slightly to 7.4% adoption
• Kenya witnessed a doubling in broadband adoption (> 4 Mbps) to 4.7% overall adoption
• From a limited amount of mobile speed data (one provider from each available African country): average connection speeds ranged from 0.6 Mbps (South Africa) to 1.7 Mbps (Egypt, Morocco)

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.