Akamai SOTI Report Shows Internet Connection Speed Up 14 Percent And We All Should Live In DC

If you want faster Internet service, you should move to Washington, D.C. Or stay right where you are and wait for things to get better, as they have been. According to the latest State of the Internet Report by Akamai Technologies, a content delivery network (CDN) player, the average Internet connection speed around the globe hiked up 14 percent compared to a year ago.

"The continued increase in average connection speeds is a reassuring trend as online retailers prepare for the busy holiday shopping season," said David Belson, editor of Akamai’s State of the Internet Report. "However, recent Internet disruptions caused by everything from government-ordered blackouts to a lone monkey sparking a widespread outage are reminders of the many factors that can affect access to and use of the Internet that is so often taken for granted."

Akamai also found that the global average peak connection speed jumped 3.7 percent to 36Mbps in the second quarter, rising 2.5 percent year over year. Interestingly, global 10Mbps broadband adoption went up slightly by 0.7 percent, which further underscores that Internet connections are collectively getting faster, but 15Mbps and 25Mbps adoption rates fell by 0.8 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.


Here in the U.S., the biggest annual gain in connection speed was observed in Washington, D.C., which now boasts the fastest average at 24.3Mbps. That's a quarterly change of 1.5 percent, and up a remarkable 47 percent year-over-year. That's still shy of the new 25Mbps broadband standard set by the Federal Communication Commission.

As a whole, the average connection speed in the U.S. is above 10Mbps. Idaho had the slowest speeds, connecting to Akamai at an average of 10.2Mbps, down 6.4 percent from the previous quarter.