Australia still lagging in broadband speeds: report

Australia has recorded an average broadband speed of 4.4Mbps for the third quarter of 2012, exceeding the global average speed by 1.4Mbps.

The figures, taken from the most recent Akamai State of the Internet report don’t, however, paint Australian broadband in a good light.

Despite a 24 percent increase in the average Australian broadband speed over the quarter, Australia ranked 39th of 242 countries, after South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore in the Asia Pacific region.

Report authors pinned the increase on 35-minute internet outage in February that brought down the previous quarter's average Australian broadband speed to 3.5Mbps.

The gold medal for connection speeds is held by South Korea, with 14.2Mbps, while the African state of Cote D’Ivoire got the wooden spoon, with an average speed of 0.4Mbps. This represented a 29 percent drop on the previous quarter.

Mobile connectivity

Russia comes out ahead when it comes to mobile connection speeds, recording an average of 7.7Mbps, while Australian networks were again also-rans, averaging 1.9Mbps.

Handset traffic analysis reveals Android leading the pack, with 38 percent of all requests on mobile networks. Second place goes to iOS with 33 percent. The ailing Blackberry accounted for only 4 percent of traffic requests.

When mobile and wifi are factored together, however, the picture changes, with iOS responsible for 60 percent of traffic requests. This comfortably outstrips Android, at 23 percent.

The data suggests Android is more often used on mobile networks, while iOS is more frequently used for wifi connections.

Hacking and attacks

The report took into account attack traffic emanating from 188 countries, an increase from 182 countries in the previous quarter.

China is the number one country for exporting attacks, with 16 percent of all traffic. This is expected, however, given China’s size and the number of domestic internet connections.

In second place was the United States, with 12 percent and Turkey with 7.6 percent.

IPv6

The shortage of IPv4 addresses will soon become acute, the report found. Although there was a 10 percent growth in the number of IPv4 addresses allocated over the quarter, internet registry sources indicate only around 16 million address blocks remain available.

IPv6 traffic, the report found, was increasing significantly, however the allocation of IPv4 is still outstripping the newer standard, suggesting many nations and users are still fixed on the old standard.