The Fastest Internet Speeds In The World

Where’s the best place to surf the web? No surprise, it’s not North America! South Korea continues to lead with the fastest internet connection speeds, according to Akamai’s eleventh quarterly State of the Internet report. The U.S. ranks 12th. As far as the best connections in the nation, the cloud optimization services provider found that Delaware has the fastest speeds.

I emailed questions about the report to David Belson, Akamai’s Director of Market Intelligence. Here are his responses:

Forbes: Why is the U.S. so low on the list?

Belson: There are two main reasons why the US is comparatively low in terms of global Internet connection speeds:

The first reason is a comparatively lower investment in broadband infrastructure in the US, as compared to many Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan, whose cities tend to dominate the list. In addition, Wall Street frequently punishes carriers in the short-term for making long-term investments in network infrastructure.

The second reason is that getting a high speed Internet connection in the US costs consumers more money than it does in other countries, so less people can afford it. This pricing issue is due in part to a lack of effective competition amongst Internet service providers in the US. This lack of competition has also provided a disincentive for broadband providers to significantly raise the speeds included in their service tiers.

Why is Delaware the fastest (in the U.S.)?

Belson: Delaware is a smaller state, and has fairly high population density – the latest statistics place it within the top 10 in the US.  That makes it easier to bring high speed connectivity to a larger percentage of the population.  In addition, it appears that Delaware may have an actively competitive marketplace – as we’ve seen in other geographies, this can drive connection speeds higher, as provider fight to attract new, and retain existing, customers.

What is it about South Korea that makes them so high?

Belson: The high population density across major South Korean cities makes it easy to reach large numbers of users with extremely high-speed connectivity.  (For instance, almost half of South Korea’s population lives in the Seoul National Capital Area, and nearly a quarter in Seoul itself.)  Additionally, the South Korean government invests in extremely high-speed connectivity, such as the Korea Information Infrastructure (KII) Plan aimed at connecting of 84% of South Korean households to broadband services with speeds of up to 1 Mbps by 2005, and the 2010 announcement of a plan to boost residential connections to 1 Gbps by 2012.

What’s also interesting about the report’s results is where most of the cyber attacks are originating and who’s getting hit hardest:

Most attack traffic comes from the U.S. – nearly one-eighth of all observed attack traffic, growing slightly from Q2

Italy accounted for nearly one third of all cyber attack traffic on mobile networks

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