U.S. broadband speeds lag behind global counterparts

South Korea and Japan collectively boast the top 45 of the 100 cities with fastest average broadband connections worldwide, while the United States has just 13 cities on the list, most in the bottom 20 percent. These are the findings in Akamai’s recently released quarterly “The State of the Internet” report [PDF], which provides Internet statistics on areas such as broadband adoption, mobile connectivity, and attack traffic.

According to Akamai, the 11 cities with the fastest average broadband speeds are all in South Korea; Taegu occupies the top spot with 18.3Mbps on average, down to Kimchon at the No. 11 slot with 13.9Mbps on average. Kanagawa, Japan appears at No. 12 at 13.3Mbps. From there, it’s all Japanese and South Korean cities and regions until the 46th slot, when Hong Kong shows up with an average speed of 8.9Mbps. A handful of Romanian, French, German, Dutch, and Norwegian cities appear on the top 100 list, above all but one American city: San Jose, Calif.

In terms of overall average broadband speeds by country, the United States lags behind eight others. South Koreans enjoy average connection rates of 14Mbps; the people of Hong Kong enjoy 9.2Mbps on average; Japan’s average speed is 8.5Mbps; Romania’s is 7.0Mbps; and the broadband providers in the Netherlands deliver average speeds of 6.3Mbps. The United States is tied for ninth place with such countries as Taiwan and Denmark with an average speed of 5.0Mbps. That’s well above the global average of 1.9Mbps.

The good news for Americans is that that national average Internet speed has increased by 11 percent over the past year, according to Akamai; notably, funding for broadband expansion was part of President Obama’s stimulus package. However, the country of Latvia saw a 27 percent increase in that same time period and now enjoys average speeds of 6.0Mbps. In that same period, Hong Kong’s speed swelled by 19 percent, Netherlands is up 14 percent, and Romania is up 12 percent. Globally, the average connection speed has improved by 14 percent over the past year.

Within the United States, Delaware is the state with the speediest average connections at 7.1Mbps. Utah and Washington, D.C. are tied at 6.4Mbps; Rhode Island averages 6.3Mbps; Vermont sees 6.2Mbps; New Hampshire averages 6.1Mbps; Massachusetts boasts 5.9 Mbps on average; California does 5.8; Nevada averages 5.6 Mbps; and Minnesota 5.5 Mbps. Notably, Minnesota’s speed has jumped 28 percent in past year, more than twice the increase of any of the other top 10 states.

Drilling down to individual U.S. cities, San Jose has the fastest average connection at 8.3Mbps, not surprising given that it’s the heart of Silicon Valley. Nearby, Fremont takes second place with average speeds of 7.0Mbps. The Boston metro region and Jersey City, NJ, share third place with two more California cities, Oakland and Riverside; all four average 6.8Mbps. Rounding out the list are Saint Paul, Minn., with an average speed of 6.7Mbps; Traverse City, Mich., and Union, NJ, tied at 6.6 Mbps; and Staten Island, NY, rounds out the top 10 at 6.5Mbps.

More Net denizens, more cyber attacks Not only are Internet users generally seeing faster speeds, they’re also seeing more neighbors jumping online. Akamai observed a 6.6 percent increase in unique IP addresses since the previous quarter in 2010, now up to over 530 million.

With Internet usage and speeds increasing, so too is Internet-based attack traffic. Akamai reports that attack traffic originates from 209 unique countries, with the most — 12 percent — coming from the United States. Russia generates 8.9 percent of the attack traffic — down from 10 percent in the previous quarter — while China is the source of 8.2 percent of the world’s attack traffic, down from 11 percent. In fourth place is Brazil, which spawns 7.9 percent of all attack traffic (up 6 percent in the past year); Taiwan is the source of 7.1 percent of the naughty bits, also up 6 percent since the past quarter.

Italy spawns the most mobile attack traffic When looking only at attack traffic coming from mobile networks, the picture is different, according to Akamai: 28 percent of that traffic comes from Italy, followed by 11 percent from the United Kingdom. Chile holds the third spot as home to 9.1 percent of mobile-network spawned attack traffic. Brazil is fourth at 7.4 percent, followed by Poland at 5.3 percent. Malaysia is in the sixth place, the originator of 4.5 percent of the mobile attack traffic, followed by China (3.4 percent), the United States (3.1 percent), and Russia (2.6 percent).

Microsoft-DS Port 445 sees less pummeling As to which ports are being targeted most around the world, Port 445, the Microsoft-DS port, continues to be hit hardest; it’s the target of 56 percent of traffic in the past quarter, down from 62 percent in the second quarter when the Conficker worm was running rampant. “While the percentages are still fairly significant, this decline may signal ongoing efforts by network service providers to identify and isolate infected systems, as well as ongoing efforts to patch and/or upgrade infected systems,” according to Akamai.

Meanwhile, Port 23, used for Telnet, became a bigger factor in the past quarter, according to Akamai. In Q2, 9.2 percent of all traffic pointed at Port 23; in Q3, it was up to 17 percent. Akamai doesn’t provide an explanation for this phenomenon, but offers a note: “Port 23 was overwhelmingly the top targeted port for attacks sourced in Egypt, Peru, and Turkey, responsible for [3.5 to 33 times] the number of attacks as the second-most targeted port (445, in all three countries). It is not clear if there is a common thread that connects these three countries, nor whether these observed attacks were brute-force login attempts, or some other botnet-related traffic.”

The remaining top targeted ports were Port 22, SSH, at 5.7 percent; Port 135, Microsoft-RPC, at 3.5 percent; NetBIOS, Port 139, at 1.5 percent; and WWW, Port 80, also at 1.5 percent.

Follow Ted Samson on Twitter at tsamson_iw.

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