Communications and Technology Industry Research

Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies, a company that provides managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online, announced the release of its inaugural “State of the Internet”, a quarterly report extrapolated from the data collected across Akamai’s global server network.

 

“State of the Internet” gives an outline about the origins of various Internet attacks, network outages, and de-peering events. It also includes a broad perspective on broadband connectivity by geography. Apart from these, the report gives an analytical study about various Internet trends, based on the data available over time.

 

Akamai’s report also collects publicly available news on instances such as Denial of Service attacks, Web site hacks, and network events.

 

“Akamai is in a unique position to provide an in-depth look at the current state of the Internet and illuminate emerging trends," said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing, Akamai. "Our hope is that this report will serve as a key indicator on important developments with the Internet, and provide guidance to companies launching initiatives that leverage the Internet as a primary delivery mechanism."

In the inaugural edition of “State of the Internet”, Akamai observed that the attack traffic is originating from 125 unique countries in the world. Among them, China and the United States are two primary sources, and they contribute for approximately 30 percent of the attack traffic. According to the report, the attack traffic targeted 23 unique network ports. Most of these attacks were caused by viruses, worms, and bots that spread across the Internet many years ago.

 

“State of the Internet” also reported some of the major network events that had great impact on the Internet. One among them includes the undersea cable cuts occurred in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of January 2008. This problem had affected the Internet connectivity in Middle East and Europe severely. In another major network event, the de-peering activities between major networks in the United States and Europe affected the Internet users in these countries for about two weeks.

On the broadband perspective, Akamai noticed that South Korea had the highest measured levels of "high broadband" connectivity (a broadband speed greater than 5 Mbps). The slowest in the list were Rwanda and Solomon Islands, with 95 percent or more of the connections to Akamai occurring below 256 Kbps.

 

Among the states in the United States, Delaware topped the list, with more than 60 percent of high broadband connectivity. Washington State and Virginia had the highest percentage of sub-256 Kbps connections in the United States.