Vinayak Hegde

Akamai has more than 36,000 servers across 70 countries serving content for various customers. This gives Akamai a bird’s eye view into systemic problems on the internet such as network outages, connectivity issues as well as end-user connectivity. Every quarter Akamai releases “State of the Internet” report which captures some of these trends. Here are some highlights from the report for Q2 2008.

Interesting Insights on India:

• Network connectivity speeds are catching up in India as the number of connections below 256Kbps is just 26%. The bad day of dialup are slowly going away.
• Broadband penetration is very miniscule though with 0.6% of users connecting with 5Mbps or more and 4.6% of users with 2Mbps or more.
• The relative amount of attack traffic originating in India has dropped with ranking falling to 15th from 10th in last quarter.

Interesting Insights on Security:

• There seem to be a lot of unpatched systems connected to the Internet with ports scanned by Sasser, Slammer and Sapphire worms being repeatedly targeted.
• The top 3 countries (Japan, US and China) contribute more than 60% of all attack traffic. Not surprisingly these countries are also the most connected.
• SQL Injection attacks are on the rise.

More detailed information is available in the downloadable PDF

If you liked this then you may also like to read

• Akamai – State of The Internet Report Q3 2008
• Akamai State of the Internet Report – Q4 2008
• The Browser Arms Race