The world according to Akamai

August 19, 2011
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment 

Almost unknown outside the online industry, Akamai operates in 72 countries around the world and delivers up to 30% of global web traffic. The company’s quarterly report on “The state of the internet”, released this month, is the definitive guide to the growth of online connections, the expansion of mobile broadband and the sources of many of the malicious threats to the network.

When Tim Berners-Lee mapped out the future of the World Wide Web at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1995, he challenged his colleagues to come up with a solution to the problems of network congestion — the World Wide Wait — that threatened to bring the internet to a standstill.

A team led by MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Tom Leighton devised a system of “distributed servers”. Each one held identical content with the ability to deliver data to the individual user via the least congested route. The insight earned the group’s business plan a place in the final of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition” in 1998 and from that sprang Akamai.

Today and every day, the company services 1 trillion requests for web content and delivers data on behalf of its customers at a speed of 5 Terabits per second (a terabit is 1,000 Megabits). Its universal coverage offers an ideal perspective on the users and abusers of the internet.

The authors of the latest quarterly report looked at the broadband definitions laid down in different parts of the world starting with the US Federal Communications Commission, which sets the threshold at a 4 Mbps minimum. Canada’s regulator targets 5 Mbps while the European Commission claims that its citizens are entitled to download speeds of up to 30 Mbps.

In Britain, the Universal Service Commitment is for a 2 Mbps service by 2012 and it is this lower figure that Akamai uses for the moment as its threshold definition of broadband.

The report says, “A connection speed of 2 Mbps is arguably sufficient for standard-definition TV-quality content and 5 Mbps for standard-definition DVD quality video content. As the quantity of HD-quality media increases over time and consumption of that media increases, end users are likely to require ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth.”

No doubt when that time comes Akamai will be ready to provide it. The company’s first State of the Internet survey appeared in May 2008. South Korea topped the list of countries with a high-speed internet connection and almost four years on, that nation remains in pole position with an average connection speed of 14.4 Mbps, up 20% on the previous year. Hong Kong (9.2 Mbps), Japan (8.1 Mbps) and the Netherlands (7.5 Mbps) are next on the list. The US comes in at 14th place at 5.3 Mbps with connections 14% faster than in Q1 2010. In the UK, the average speed is 4.6 Mbps – some way below the figure of 6.8 Mbps that Ofcom claims in the recent Communications Market Report.

A list of the world’s Top 100 cities ranked by average connection speed includes three in Romania but none from the UK. Residents of Lyse, Norway, enjoy the fastest average connection speed in Europe at 8.1 Mbps.

Akamai measures connection speed to their servers and removes academic and mobile networks so the average speed is inevitably at variance with the Ofcom figure. Which figure is most representative is hard to determine although Akamai does draw a distinction between average speed over time and the peak connection speed that users can attain.

For those who wish to compare broadband performance in different countries, Akamai provides a useful Data Visualisation chart into which users may type country names and get an instant graph of online speeds from Q1 2008 to Q1 this year. Belgium and Ireland provide a revealing comparison with current UK performance.

Ericsson teamed up with Akamai to provide some interesting data on mobile networks for this 40-page report, which is free to download from the website. For once, the UK plays a starring role, thanks to the 3 network, which at 22.7 Mbps offers the highest peak connection speed of any mobile service provider in the world. Although the average data rate is a more conservative 4.2 Mbps, the network still ends up in a respectable third-place position.

Customers of 3 consumed a monthly average of 105 Mbytes during Q1 2011 in line with the trend for data to exceed the volume of voice traffic, which began in Q4 2009. The most recent figures reveal that data usage has more than doubled since then while voice traffic has remained almost the same.

Although it would be easy to believe that tablet and smartphone owners are the biggest users of mobile data, the laptop community makes the biggest demands on the network as each subscriber consumes as much as 7 Gbytes a month. Almost 40% of this data is online video received over long periods of intensive network activity while web browsing and social networks account for a further 25% or so of the total.

Tablet users consumed 250–800 Mbytes each month in Q1, according to the report, while smartphone owners averaged 80–600 Mbytes. Despite the lower appetite for data, usage patterns are remarkably similar to those of laptop owners. Consumption of online video, however, tends to take place in short bursts, which suggests video clips rather than long-form entertainment. The smaller screens of handheld devices might also inhibit owners from using them to watch feature films.

Despite the growing number of web-connected devices and the increase in mobile data usage, the growth in attacks on the internet continues. The Akamai report details the countries that are the main source of threats to the security of the network. In 2008, China and the US were in first and second place as sources of “attack traffic”, which came from 125 countries around the world. Half of all the attacks came from the top four nations on the list, which included Taiwan and Venezuela.

This year, among 199 countries that are the source of attack traffic, the US takes second place to Myanmar (Burma), which accounts for 13%. Taiwan appears in third place again and Russia, which didn’t feature at all in the 2008 list, places fourth. Although these attacks are not necessarily targeted at individual users, the Akamai analysis shows how important it is to maintain defences against the forces of darkness and malicious intent that lurk within every internet connection and threaten every web site.

Not all disruption to online activity is the result of deliberate action, though, as residents of Georgia and Armenia discovered when users in both countries were unable to connect to the internet for 12 hours in the middle of the day. It was revealed later that a 75-year-old woman in a search for scrap metal had cut through a fibre optic cable that belonged to Georgian Railway Telecom. When told of the consequences of her action, she reportedly told local authorities that she had no idea what the internet was and had wanted only to collect firewood.

Akamai’s charts for the day showed “an uncharacteristically large dip” in traffic delivered to the two countries at a time that coincided with the woman’s arrest. Although most of the world might not know of the firm, an attack on the internet from whatever source will surely come to be known as an Akamai.