India’s broadband adoption rate has grown over 5x in the last two years

Akamai Technologies, Inc., a provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and business applications has released its Second Quarter, 2014 State of the Internet Report. The report is based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ and provides insight into key global statistics such as connection speeds and broadband adoption across fixed and mobile networks, overall attack traffic, global 4K readiness, etc. Key pointers globally:

• Global average connection speed above the 4 Mbps “broadband” threshold for the first time
• Global DDoS attack numbers decline, showing 15% year-over-year drop
• Global unique IPv4 address count drops quarter-over-quarter for first time in history of report

The key highlight for India in this report is that despite having the lowest adoption rate in the second quarter, broadband connectivity in India is clearly improving over the long-term. In looking at historical data, India’s broadband adoption rate has grown over 5x since the second quarter of 2012 (two years), and over 10x since the second quarter of 2011 (three years). This is expected to accelerate in future with the announcement by Department of Telecom in June to finalize a National Broadband Policy within 100 days.

India is in the 5th position for attack traffic originating by IP source. India’s current connection speed is at 2.0 Mbps.

The largest year-over-year changes in broadband adoption rates across the surveyed Asia Pacific countries/regions were seen in the four countries with the lowest levels of adoption. Vietnam led the group, growing 722% year-over-year, followed by Indonesia and the Philippines, which added more than 200% over the past year, and India, which saw a 179% increase.

The global average connection speed increased 21% from the first to second quarter of the year. At 4.6 Mbps, the global average connection speed exceeded the 4 Mbps “broadband” threshold for the first time. Eight of the top 10 countries/regions saw double-digit percentage increases from the first to the second quarter of 2014, though South Korea kept its first place average connection speed (24.6 Mbps) with only a 4% quarterly increase.

See the interactive map of internet connectivity from Akamai here and stay tuned for more numbers from this report.