Japan and Korea still play host to a large percentage of the world’s cities with the fastest access speeds.
Research conducted by Akamai around Internet traffic in Q4 last year showed that 60 cities in Japan and 16 cities in Korea feature in the study’s list of the world’s top 100 cities with the fastest Internet connections. Hong Kong was the only other Asian city to make the list.
These same three countries also topped the global list for average connection speeds.
The Asia Pacific also scored well on the Internet penetration front, with China, Japan and South Korea making the top 10 list of countries with the largest number of unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai network. Akamai however, cautioned that this method of measuring Internet penetration could be affected by individual users who have multiple unique IP address associated with them due to multiple device use.
Broadband adoption in the Asia Pacific was led by Japan and Hong Kong, with 58% and 56% of connections having speeds in excess of 5 Mbps. Malaysia had just 1.9% of connections enjoying such speeds, despite enjoying a 170% increase from the previous quarter.
India, Philippines and China featured as the Asia Pacific countries with the least percentages of high broadband speeds.
Akamai’s study, which also examined traffic from 105 mobile carriers worldwide, found that 62 of these carriers experienced an increase in average data consumption over the previous quarter, and 89 saw a year-on-year consumption increase. Average peak connection speeds had more than doubled on a yearly basis for 30 providers.