Akamai releases fourth quarter 2013 ‘State of the Internet’ report

Akamai Technologies, Inc. has released its Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report. Based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform™, the report provides insight into key global statistics such as network connectivity and connection speeds, attack traffic, broadband trends and availability, and IPv6 adoption. It also includes measurements of page load times using Akamai’s real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities provides insights on Akamai traffic activity related to Internet disruptions in Syria, Suriname, Guyana, Libya and Cuba.

Data and graphics from the Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report can also be found on the Akamai blog and through the Akamai State of the Internet app for iPads and iPhones.

European Highlights from Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report:
Average and Average Peak Connection Speeds: impressive year-over-year gains observed
The Global average connection speed continued to improve, with a quarterly increase of 5.5 percent, to reach 3.8 Mbps. Despite this improvement, half the countries/regions listed among the top 10 in global average connection speeds – including the top four countries/regions – actually saw nominal declines quarter-over-quarter, ranging from a loss of 0.7 percent in the Netherlands to a drop of 6.7 percent in Latvia. Despite a 1.1 percent decline in average connection speed, South Korea held the top spot in the fourth quarter of 2013, reporting the highest average connection speed of 21.9 Mbps.

European countries appearing among the top 10 countries/regions demonstrated impressive year-over-year improvements in average connection speeds. The Netherlands (ranked #3 globally) achieved a 38 percent increase (to 12.4 Mbps) compared to the end of 2012, while Switzerland (#5) grew by 27 percent (to 12.0 Mbps). The Czech Republic (#6) grew by 30 percent (to 11.4 Mbps) as did Sweden (#7) (to 10.5 Mbps). While Latvia (#8) grew by 11 percent, Ireland (#9) experienced a notable year-over-year increase of 59 percent (to 10.4 Mbps).

Global average peak connection speeds recovered from a small decline in the third quarter of 2013 with an impressive improvement of 30 percent to 23.2 Mbps in the fourth quarter.

In Europe, Romania’s 11 percent increase this quarter saw it break through the 50 Mbps barrier to achieve an average peak connection speed of 50.6 Mbps, while a number of European countries across the region attained an average peak connection speed above 40 Mbps; Switzerland (44.2 Mbps), the Netherlands (43.6 Mbps), the United Kingdom (43.5 Mbps), Belgium (43.2 Mbps) and Sweden (42.1 Mbps).

Announcements made during the fourth quarter of 2013 point to the future strong improvement of average peak connection speeds among European countries. In October, French telecommunications provider Illiad launched a gigabit network service, while in November Swisscom announced the availability of a 1 Gbps subscription tier for over 650,000 residential customers. Meanwhile, Finland’s government revealed it plans to upgrade the country’s international data transfer capacity with a new 100 million euro undersea optic cable, due for implementation in 2015, which will run directly from Germany to Finland.

European High Broadband Connectivity: yearly growth in excess of 100 percent observed
European high broadband (>10 Mbps) adoption rates continued apace, with the Netherlands and Switzerland leading the region with adoption rates of 45 percent and 42 percent respectively.

Five additional countries (Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, United Kingdom and Sweden) saw more than 30 percent of connections to Akamai at speeds of 10 Mbps or above, while Finland, Ireland, Norway and Austria achieved high broadband adoption rates of 20 percent or greater.

Quarterly growth rates among the countries surveyed ranged from 1.0 percent in the Netherlands up to an impressive 30 percent in Italy. A double-digit percentage growth in adoption rates was also observed in Sweden (19 percent), Finland (18 percent), Turkey (14 percent) and the United Kingdom (11 percent).

Significant year-over-year increases in high broadband adoption were observed in a number of European countries. Turkey led the pack, growing 234 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012. Joining Turkey in seeing adoption rates more than double were Ireland (178 percent), France (144 percent), Spain (127 percent) and Belgium (123 percent).

“We’ve reached a significant milestone in the improvement of average connection speeds,” said David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report. “The fact that all of the top 10 countries/regions’ average connection speeds are now at or exceeding the high broadband threshold – and continued strong growth in countries like South Korea and Ireland – is indicative of the progress that’s being made in broadband penetration. It’s reasonable to expect these promising trends will continue to be reflected in future reports.”

Attack Traffic and Security: Port 445 remains the most targeted port
Akamai maintains a distributed set of unadvertised agents deployed across the Internet to log connection attempts that the company classifies as attack traffic. Based on the data collected by these agents, Akamai is able to identify the top countries from which attack traffic originates, as well as the top ports targeted by these attacks. It is important to note, however, that the originating country as identified by the source IP address may not represent the nation in which an attacker resides.

During the fourth quarter of 2013, Akamai identified 188 countries/regions that originated observed attack traffic; this is three more than last quarter. China maintained its position as the country that originated the most observed attack traffic, with quarter-over-quarter growth from 35 percent to 43 percent. It was followed by the United States at 19 percent (up from 11 percent in the third quarter) and Canada – which grew by 25 times quarter-over-quarter to 10 percent. Europe’s contribution to attack traffic dropped to just over 11 percent, down from over 13 percent in the previous quarter.

Port 445 (Microsoft-DS) remained the most targeted port in the fourth quarter, growing to 30 percent of observed attacks quarter over quarter. It was the top targeted port in six of the top 10 countries/regions, including Germany, Romania, Russia, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States. Port 80 (WWW/HTTP) remained in second place, accounting for a consistent 14 percent of attacks. Port 443 (SSL/HTTPS) remained in third place this quarter, but dropped from 13 percent to 8.2 percent quarter over quarter.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack Traffic: European customers experience a slight decrease in DDoS attacks this quarter
In addition to observations on attack traffic, the State of the Internet Report includes insights into DDoS attacks based on reports from Akamai’s customers.
Although the number of DDoS attacks reported by Akamai customers declined from the second quarter (318) to the third quarter of 2013 (281), reported attacks increased 23 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter (346) of the same year. In total, customers reported 1,153 DDoS attacks in 2013 – a 50 percent increase from 768 in 2012.

A total of 38 attacks were reported in Europe during the fourth quarter of 2013, representing a slight fall on the previous quarter. In total, Europe accounted for 14 percent (167) of all reported attacks in 2013.

Enterprise and commerce continued to be the industries targeted most frequently by the reported DDoS attacks in the fourth quarter, at 159 and 82 attacks respectively. Together, they account for just under 70 percent of the reported attacks during the quarter.

In the Third Quarter, 2013 State of the Internet Report, Akamai started looking at the likelihood of a company experiencing repeat attacks after an initial DDoS attack. In the third quarter Akamai reported this as a one-in-four probability. In the fourth quarter of 2013, the risk of a repeated attack increased significantly to one in three (35 percent), meaning that 56 of the 162 organizations that were attacked suffered repeated threats throughout the quarter.

In February, Akamai acquired Prolexic Technologies, Inc., a company that provides cloud-based security solutions for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from DDoS attacks. As a result, future State of the Internet Reports will include insights using additional observations from Prolexic’s Quarterly DDoS Attack Report. Note that unless otherwise specified, observations included in the respective reports are based on separate and distinct sets of DDoS attacks.

Internet Penetration: European countries continue to lead the world in IPv6 adoption
In the fourth quarter of 2013, more than 780 million IPv4 addresses from 238 unique countries/regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform - nearly 3 percent more than in the third quarter and 10 percent more than in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Among European countries appearing in the top 10 global countries list, the quarter-over-quarter changes in unique IPv4 addresses ranged from -1.6 percent in the United Kingdom (ranked #6 globally) to 3.3 percent in Italy (#9).

The United States and select European countries continued to lead the world in terms of IPv6 adoption, with seven European countries (Switzerland, Romania, Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, France and Ireland) appearing in the top 10 country/region listing.

Double-digit percentage quarter-on-quarter growth rates were seen in Germany (43 percent), Luxembourg (35 percent), Switzerland (33 percent), Belgium (23 percent) and Ireland (14 percent).

Colleges and universities continued to be early adopters of IPv6, with moderate to large quarterly increases in adoption rates seen across most of the top 10. In Europe, the University of Vienna Austria saw double-digit growth with 43 percent of requests to Akamai over IPv6 in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Mobile Connectivity: Russian mobile operator achieves top average connection speed at 8.9 Mbps
In the fourth quarter of 2013, average connection speeds on surveyed mobile network providers ranged from a high of 8.9 Mbps (Russian mobile provider RU-1) down to a low of 0.6 Mbps (mobile provider ZA-1 in South Africa). The high is down just slightly from the 9.5 Mbps reported in the third quarter of 2013.

Akamai also conducted a fourth-quarter analysis of Akamai IO data to determine which user agents were used most frequently for mobile traffic requests. Based on data collected from a sample of requests from mobile devices to the Akamai Intelligent Platform over cellular networks, Android Webkit accounted for approximately 35 percent of requests and Apple Mobile Safari trailed at more than 29 percent of traffic. However, for traffic from mobile devices on all networks (not just cellular networks), Apple Mobile Safari was responsible for more than 47 percent of requests, while Android Webkit drove only 32 percent of requests.

Based on traffic data collected by Ericsson, the volume of mobile data traffic increased by 70 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013, and grew approximately 15 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2013.