The good news, according to Akamai, a high-performance Web and analytics company, is that “the global average connection speed experienced a 14% quarter-over-quarter increase in the first three months of 2012, returning to 2.6 Mbps (Megabits per second.” The bad news is we want much faster connections than we’re getting.
Akamai, in its The State of the Internet, 1st Quarter 2012 report (PDF link, registration required.), now defines “high broadband” as connections to Akamai at speeds of 10 Mbps or greater. In the past, the company defined “narrowband” as connections to Akamai at speeds of 256 Kbps (Kilobits per second) or below, but as connection speeds continue to increase globally, especially in countries with developing infrastructure, the number of connections that Akamai sees at these levels continues to decline so Akamai will no longer be reporting on narrowband adoption.
With those specifications, Akamai found that with a few exceptions, South Korea, the last mile of Internet was getting faster throughout the world.