As Internet gets faster, Hong Kong and South Korea lead the broadband speed derby

The Internet saw its average peak connection speed jump almost 35 percent at the end of last year, even as more and more people started accessing vital (and trivial) Internet services through their mobile devices, according to the latest edition of Akamai’s State of the Internet report for the three months ending December 31, 2012. Akamai calculates the speeds and other data included in the report based on activity on the Akamai network.

• South Korea had an average speed of 14 Mbps while Japan came in second with 10.8 Mbps and the U.S. came in the eighth spot with 7.4 Mbps.
• Hong Kong came in first with peak speed of 57.5 Mbps while South Korea came in at 49.3 Mbps. The United States came in 13th at 31.5 Mbps.
• Global broadband adoption rates are closer to 42 percent while high broadband (higher than 10 Mbps) adoption rates are at 11 percent. In South Korea, nearly 49 percent of connections qualify as high-broadband, followed by Japan with 39 percent and the U.S. at 19 percent. South Korea has 86 percent broadband penetration, while the U.S. stands at 64 percent.
• The average connection speeds on surveyed mobile networks ranged from just over 8.0 Mbps to 345 kbps.