Akamai's State of the Internet - How Does Australia Fare?

Post by trog @ 10:48am 27/05/09 | 28 Comments

Akamai have published their quarterly "State of the Internet" report for Q4 2008. Of interest are the numbers for broadband adoption and average broadband speed for the major regions:

Australia: 50% adoption, 2808 kbps average
Asia: 45%, 4616 kbps average
Africa: 13%, 1176 kbps average
Europe: 70%, 3616 kbps average
South America: 17%, 1312 kbps average
North America: 61%, 3896 kbps average

The report also includes data about a bunch of interesting Internet things, such as attack traffic (the US is #1, followed by China and Sweden, with ports 445, 80, 139 and 22 the most heavily attacked - only 0.36% came from Australia, so nice work everyone!), social networking downtime (Twitter is miles in the lead), fastest average Internet speeds by country (South Korea: 15.0Mbps, Japan: 7.0Mbps, Hong Kong: 6.9Mbps, Romania: 5.7Mbps). It's heavily focused on the US, but it's an interesting read.

akamai internet

Latest Comments

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mongie
Posted 12:04pm 27/5/09

Try hovering over the dots on the Australian map.

SaintLucia (UQ)
Monash
Bentley (Curtin)

whats up with that? I thought it was an old wives tale that the net went through the sandstone universities?

last edited by mongie at 12:04:12 27/May/09

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thermite
Posted 12:52pm 27/5/09

I was told in 1995 when I got the Internet, that the basement of the Prentice centre at UQ holds the backbone for QLD's Internet. Whatever that means.

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mongie
Posted 01:18pm 27/5/09

I was told that too, but I didn't think it was true anymore...

(thats where AARNET is apparently... I don't _really_ understand what AARNET is these days in relation to the greater "internet").

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Steve Farrelly
Posted 01:31pm 27/5/09

a wizard did it

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dranged
Posted 02:07pm 27/5/09

Where are Akamai getting their stats from?

Prentice operate a DSL service as a layer 2 reseller; so, given commercial ISP interests, I suspect, aren't likely to divulge this information, perhaps Universities are much more open about statistical metrics? (this would seem logical).

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tequila
Posted 02:13pm 27/5/09

Where are Akamai getting their stats from?

they are basically the worlds biggest internet mirror

they are the internet.

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dranged
Posted 02:20pm 27/5/09

Ok, but this still doesn't explain why Curtin / Monash / St Lucia were chosen.
An IP flow by intuition can be traced back to a state / suburb / isp, but IP ranges are given by APNIC to enterprises; these are typically dynamically assigned, this is why 000 is so difficult on Voip. They must be correlating their stats with some access providers.

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tequila
Posted 02:41pm 27/5/09

I think you'll find akami just happen to have their s*** hosted in those places
more often than not when google or some other provider knows a rough idea of where you are, they are only getting back to a router which is a few hops from you

like anyone on the northside using optus cable would know, fitzg1 etc is a pretty central hub

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mongie
Posted 03:02pm 27/5/09

So, AARNET peer with AKAMAI? Thus StLucia?

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deadlyf
Posted 03:22pm 27/5/09

What does the percentage of adoption represent? Is it based on population or purely geographical?

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3dee
Posted 03:32pm 27/5/09

So 50% of people still have dial-up? OUCH

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MILKO
Posted 04:58pm 27/5/09

What internet?
Most australian states still have pedal power dial up. "What is that broadband it sounds interesting gee i hope we get that soon". Hurry ruddy I'm getting tired but holy crap I'm fit.

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Midda
Posted 05:19pm 27/5/09

So 50% of people still have dial-up? OUCH

Not basing this on any evidence, but I doubt 50% of the population is using dial-up, since a good number of people just don't have the internet full stop.

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whoop
Posted 05:48pm 27/5/09

I used to only see the akamai name in downloads off MS on occasion & wonder what it was, now I'm seeing it all over the place. I wonder what would happen if akamai went down, would the internet collapse? Seems everyone relies on them pretty heavily.

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nF
Posted 06:26pm 27/5/09

(thats where AARNET is apparently... I don't _really_ understand what AARNET is these days in relation to the greater "internet").

I have a text book at home that says "The Internet is called AARNET in Australia". Even internet is spelt with a capital.

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Cat Scratch
Posted 09:37pm 27/5/09

"but I doubt 50% of the population is using dial-up, since a good number of people just don't have the internet full stop."

OMG! That is worse than dial-up!

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Quickreply
Posted 08:11am 28/5/09

Quick answer to some AARNet Questions, you can fund more detail at the AARNet website www.aarnet.edu.au

- Yes AARNet started the Internet in Australia and ran the backbone and peering services for the first 5 years or so before selling it to Telstra (Now bigpond). AARNet2 was a microwave based network. AARNet3 is a fibre optic based network.

- AARNet is still one of the biggest carriers (by volume) in Australia with multiple 10G links between capital cities. There are 2 PoP sites in each of Bris, Melb, Syd, Canb, Adel, Perth servicing all 40 Universities, CSIRO, many research organisations, Several TAFEs and some schools.

- They do peer with Akamai, MS, Google, ABC, internode, WAIX ... etc and are one of the top peering organisations in the world.

- Unfortunately you can't get an AARNet fibre direct into you home :(

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pixem
Posted 10:03am 28/5/09

I like the fact Africa has speeds above 1Meg. Surpassed my wildest imagination.

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$ack
Posted 11:16am 28/5/09

Achievement Unlocked:

Beating Africa's Internet.

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Glen Turner
Posted 10:52am 29/5/09

AARNet hosts a Akamai cluster in one of its Sydney POPs. The amount of traffic pulled by our mostly-university customers exceeds 1Gbps most days. Ourselves, Internode and iiNet have a "mutual recognition" agreement between our respective Akamai clusters so that we use these neighbouring caches if one cache has a problem, preventing that 1Gbps from suddenly being sourced from overseas. We make the Akamai cluster available to our peers in circumstances where that doesn't cost us much (eg, not to our overseas peers).

The exact locations St Lucia, Curtin and Monash don't really match up to AARNet POPs. They do of course match up to major AARNet customers. Given the privacy conditions which the Telecommunications Act places upon ISPs revealing customer information it is a tad disappointing to see one of our suppliers revealing information down to this level. I'll be taking that up with Akamai.

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trog
Posted 11:22am 29/5/09

cool, thanks for taking the time to post. I am fascinated as to the path that lead you here though :)

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straw hat hippie
Posted 12:00pm 29/5/09

all roads lead to qgl

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greazy
Posted 10:24pm 29/5/09

Speaking of st lucia/UQ, is it true there are tunnels under/around the great court? A friend believes he's found the entrance, it's big enough to stand up and walk around in.

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FraktuRe
Posted 10:38pm 29/5/09

Speaking of strange tunnels, I discovered a staircase leading undergroud that has no entrance at griffith GC the other day. Could see stairs going down through a small window, but there was no way to get to them :S

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HeardY
Posted 10:50pm 29/5/09

trog, Glen appears to be from SA (so the AARNET website says) therefore I blame trix for telling him about this thread :p

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kos
Posted 01:50pm 30/5/09

all roads lead to ~~qgl~~ AusGamers

Fixed.

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FraktuRe
Posted 02:00pm 30/5/09

all roads lead to AusGamers, which in turn leads to qgl, which in turn leads to kos' mum.

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kos
Posted 03:13pm 30/5/09

To quote a once great philosopher...

But seriously frakture why are you such a d******* lately?

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